Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide, ChaosRadioAustin.org.
And our guest this hour is the great Charles Goyette, my friend and partner in crime at Anti-War Radio, Antiwar.com slash radio.
All his anti-war interviews and mine can be found there.
And he's the host of the Morning Drive Time Show on KFNX 1100 AM in Phoenix, Arizona.
Hey, Charles, how you doing, man?
Scott, we never get to talk often enough.
I know.
Well, that's really the problem, right?
Yeah.
Well, if you have me on your show, I'll have you on my show, and then we'll get to cover a lot more ground that way.
Oh, yeah.
There you go.
I actually have a producer now, and I'm going to try to get Angela working with Dave so that we're not interviewing the same people on the same day all the time or within two days of each other.
I got Nick Terse tomorrow.
Oh, yeah.
And I'm going to have to interview him about something entirely different than what you interviewed him about, at least.
You know, he's got some new stuff anyway, I saw.
Yeah, I haven't had a chance to read his book, but yeah, he had a new article on Tom Dispatch I'm going to ask him about.
Well, listen, the forces that we're arrayed against, Scott, are so mighty and powerful that sometimes we've just got to double-team them, you know it?
Yeah, you know, you might as well interview Chalmers Johnson twice, right?
Why not?
I mean, God, couldn't we all profit from that?
I'll tell you what, hey, I just shared the audio with the good people here on the show of Ron Paul and the Glenn Beck show last night.
Did you see that?
Yeah, I heard about it.
I saw a quick snip of it, so Glenn Beck is starting to worry about the things that Ron Paul's been talking about for 20 years, huh?
Yeah, exactly.
Now that McCain has the nomination pretty much locked up, now it's time to treat Paul like the expert that he is and bring him on to tell the people the truth about what's going on here.
It's pretty good.
It even gets to the point where Beck starts to, of course, he has to categorize as a conspiracy theorist or whatever, but he's basically saying, I'm starting to suspect that maybe when we're looking at these hundreds of billions of dollars of bailouts and all this inflation coming and all these different things we're talking about, I'm beginning to suspect bad motives on the part of some of these people.
Well, you know this business, I was just dealing with that on the show here in Phoenix this morning, this business about conspiracy theory, this falls under the category of shut up, he explained.
I mean, in other words, when you bring something up, you know, instead of refuting what you have suggested, you know, they label it conspiracy theory so it doesn't need to be discussed anymore.
I just reported on the show today a story about professional engineers that are very concerned that a trade association, the American Society of Civil Engineers, that has been paid by the federal government to investigate things like, you know, the collapsing building on 9-11, paid by the federal government to investigate the collapsing levees in the Katrina event, has cooked their report.
And here are other professional engineers, you know, these are highly respected academics in the field saying, wait a minute, their conclusions have been cooked.
And so I report the story and I said, you know, I'm a little reluctant to just tell you the story, read the Associated Press story to you, because somebody is questioning conventional wisdom and orthodoxy, and that puts you in the category automatically of being some sort of conspiracy theorist.
But you know, if you believed conventional wisdom and orthodoxy, everything would be rolling along just fine, we'd have been out of Iraq in six weeks, I doubt six months, and the U.S. dollar would be as good as gold, and oil would be, you know, $25 a barrel.
Right, and now, in defense of the people who slime people with the term conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorists, it is the case that a lot of kooks have at least some principles and disapprove strongly of the status quo, pay lots of attention, and there are lots of leaps to conclusion, and aha, well, if somebody said that there's a problem with the report, that's the final proof that Dick Cheney put bombs in those towers, etc.
And so there is, you know, it's really too bad that there's so many people who are willing to make such leaps to conclusion, because, well, it makes it to where, well, like you said, we're kind of at risk for asking questions that are decent questions.
Well, you know, Scott, there's no educated human being that doesn't understand how you really get to the truth of this stuff, and it is the methodical presentation and examination of the evidence.
Period.
End of story.
And if people want to fudge on one side and conceal the evidence and not talk about it, then, you know, I don't want to play with that much, and if you've got other people that want to present evidence but don't want it methodically examined, I don't want to play with them either.
It's all very simple to deal with all of this stuff, you know, and every question or unknown series of circumstances doesn't create, you know, some dark conspiracy.
But every question or every off-limit document or concealed investigation raises questions.
There you go.
Sure.
And, you know, if you come from a libertarian viewpoint where you're an individualist and you understand that man acts in what he believes is his own rational self-interest and that kind of thing from the get-go, then there's basically no history, at least in the 20th century, that's the official history that's actually right.
I mean, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist at all to just recognize the fact that our government lies every day.
And that's the official news of the day, and then the official news of the day becomes the history of the day, but that doesn't make it true.
You know, and the poor people find out years later.
I was talking about this with respect to the prospects for an impending American attack on Iran.
You know, we had this event a week or so ago, actually just a few days ago, in which Bush shows up at the Pentagon, you know, one of those secret meetings with the Joint Chiefs up on the second floor of the Pentagon, and they put out the story that, you know, the president has gone from the White House to the Pentagon because they're going to talk about troop withdrawals.
Well, they've planned troop withdrawals, they've talked about troop withdrawals, but it's a cover story.
And it's like, you know, it's like during the Nixon presidency, you'd get a cover story.
Henry Kissinger disappears from Washington.
Where is he?
Well, he's with Jill St. John or some starlet down vacationing in the Bahamas.
And that's the cover story gets put out, and then, you know, ten years later, everybody reads his biography, and you realize he actually went to Beijing.
And it's the same thing.
They put out a cover story that Bush has gone to the Pentagon, you know, because he's going to talk with the Joint Chiefs about troop withdrawals, but you know, there's an awful lot of strange things going on at the same time, starting with the resignation of Admiral Fallon.
You've got Cheney's victory tour in the Middle East.
You've got Maliki moving to eliminate the Shia militia in the south of Iraq.
All these sorts of things that you would normally think would be undertaken in preparation for an American strike on Iran.
So you know, it's, I think, valuable in and of itself to raise questions of, well, what is Bush actually doing at the Pentagon?
What is Cheney actually doing in the Middle East?
Why was actually Fallon forced to resign at this time?
And you know, go back to who created the Federal Reserve.
Well, it was a bunch of bankers who wrote it, and in fact, they pretended to oppose it in order to get it passed.
They said, this is Bolshevism.
We've got to stop them, and everybody said, well, if Rockefeller's against it, I want it.
This is the, well, the proverbial line is the fox guarding the hen house.
It's like John McCain, you know, with lobbying reform, or Rush Limbaugh guarding the medicine chest.
These are the bankers.
They have created the largest regulatory body in the United States in the free world, and they own it, and they control it.
Now, you're talking about a body that has no oversight, no auditing, no accountability, is not responsible to the electors and taxpayers of the country, and it oversees the banking industry.
That's great.
That makes a lot of sense, Scott.
Well, it seems like I can tell from all the news over the past few weeks that, well, the past few months, everything's going great.
They're doing a great job, right?
The Federal Reserve has presided over one debacle after another, and so this is consistently what you get in the Bush administration.
You know, George Tenet talks about slam dunks about evidence that he knows isn't there, and so he gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Paul Wolfowitz says, you know, the war will pay for itself with Iraqi oil, and so they appoint this economic genius to be the president of the World Bank.
I mean, Larry Lindsey talks about the potential cost of the Iraq War, and he's closer than anybody else originally, and so they fire him for his troubles.
I mean, this is the Federal Reserve that has mismanaged everything that it's touched.
We have had a veritable rollercoaster ride, the worst depression in the history of the country, the total destruction of the American dollar during their reign, and so we want to put them in charge of everything else.
We want to put them in charge of the securities industry.
We want to give them the keys to bail out the securities industry, insurance industry, and more.
I mean, it's just, this is utter madness.
Well now, what exactly is the Power Grab?
I heard your great interview with Lew Rockwell from yesterday, it's up on antiwar.com slash radio right now, and I've heard some references to this, but I have to tell you, I haven't really been covering it on the show, well, except right now, and I haven't really been reading about it.
What expansions of power are actually taking place now, in the name of this crisis, and under the authority of the Fed?
Yeah, here's the template, it is exactly what the Federal Institution has done with the intelligence agencies.
They want to create another super-bureaucracy of intelligence to oversee the failed intelligence agencies and keep them from being held accountable for their miserable failures.
So in this case, you're going to get the Federal Reserve named, listen to this, named as the market stability regulator.
This is an open door to any kind of possible regulatory authority that you can imagine.
I mean, you're going to extend to the Federal Reserve the authority over federally charted insurers, financial institutions, the market, their job is going to be to stave off funding shortages.
In other words, some industry, insurance industry, or banks, or their equivalent has a shortage of funding.
It'll be the job of the Federal Reserve to reliquify them.
If there is some sort of panic, suppose the administration gets us into another war over the next couple of weeks in Iran, and there's a panic of people withdrawing money from the banks, it is the job of the Federal Reserve then to stop the panic, and that means, you know, declare the bank holidays to reliquify the banks by running the printing presses.
I mean, virtually they will be able to do anything they want, and they will control the entire economy.
And I mean, they're going to control everything.
The Office of Thrift Supervision that watches the banks, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, all of those responsibilities are going to be shoveled off to another agency, and the Federal Reserve is going to be the super-regulating deity in the sky that will be completely in charge of the American economy.
Wow.
That's really incredible.
I mean, I guess, where the Securities and Exchange Commission and Treasury Department and so forth, they have to actually answer to Congress, but the Federal Reserve, really, they just send Bernanke up there to blow some smoke up some orifices, and that's about it.
Yeah, and I guess that's a key point.
I mean, you and I agree that there should be a Fed to begin with, or Treasury monkeying with the economy to the extent that they do this stuff.
But at least with the Treasury, I mean, you know, the American people could get ahead of steam and have the bums thrown out.
But you're right, the Fed has no accountability whatsoever.
There's virtually no oversight except for these meaningless exchanges, these meaningless congressional exchanges, a joint economic committee testimony, no auditing whatsoever.
I mean, the whole thing is madness.
It's giving a blank check to the banking industry and the investment banks, and, you know, it's no surprise that Goldman Sachs is the author of this thing.
You remember, Scott, when, gosh, I guess it was in the early 90s, Goldman Sachs was the push in Mexico, they were investing a huge, huge amount of money in Mexican bonds.
Mexico, third world, backwater, klepto-narcocracy is virtually bankrupt.
And so Robert Rubin, former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, now the Secretary of the Treasury, they run in there with a rescue plan that uses $20 billion that the American taxpayers money to guarantee the bonds issued by the government of Mexico, who's got a big portfolio of Mexican bonds, it's Goldman Sachs.
Right, and I remember, too, that Congress said no.
And Bill Clinton said, forget you, and he made a phone call to Greenspan and they got it done.
They got it done, and you know who helped to do it was Newt Gingrich.
I mean, this is the same old story, you know, it's the two wings of the Washington party.
Right, and of course it's known as the Mexico bailout, not the Goldman Sachs bailout.
But he had to pay it back, the average schmuck in Mexico, the average taxpayer in Mexico had to pay that money back, plus interest.
Three months later, six months later, you look at the quarterly reports from Goldman Sachs, they report the record profits, the highest profitability in the company's history.
Yep.
There you go.
Well there it is, the name of the game is bailout, that's what it's all about.
You're too big to fail, because you're a friend of mine, and so I'm just going to counterfeit some money and deposit it in your account.
Well, when you cultivate institutions that have, you know, what surprises me is from the purported conservatives who used to talk, used to have a mantra about, you know, personal responsibility and stuff like that, you know, personal responsibility, when you have institutions that are insulated from the consequences of their own inept decisions, when they are insulated from that, you end up cultivating more such institutions.
And they all line up, and they all use their political clout to get the political institutions to protect them from the follies of their own investments or their own practices, and who pays?
The people pay.
Yep, and you know, it's funny, Ross Perot used to talk about the special interests, the special interests, but nobody could ever really seem to figure out what he was talking about, at least among, you know, just regular people.
But it seems to me like this is actually the essence of what most Americans don't understand, that if they did, well, at least they would see things very differently, that rather than, you know, everything is apple pie and blue sky and A-OK, what we actually have here is a government that's so big, and with a budget so big, and with power so vast, that you have in the pharmaceutical industry, in the airplane and bomb-making industry, in healthcare and, you know, everything, insurance, banking, any group of businessmen who are operating on, you know, a high level of, you know, even low millions of dollars, they basically have to get in good with the government one way or another.
I think I read Bill Gates didn't even have a lobbying firm until he got taken to federal court.
Now he has the biggest lobbying firm in D.C.
And so this is the problem, is we have a Congress, which, you know, I think the members of the House are a dime a dozen and the Senators two bits, and so you have this entire massive segment of the economy, I don't know what the proportion is, that is just completely invested in the exercise of state power and in the collection of tax money.
Well, the question for you, Scott, is this, what is it about the American people in the face of the dismal failure of this state power in terms of the war, in terms of the economy, in terms of the value of their currency, their prosperity, in the face of the dismal performance of these status R's and D's alike, what is it, Scott, that has the American people continuing to sleepwalk through their daily lives about it?
Why is it that they believe that the authorities remain in charge and they know what's best and they'll do the right thing?
How do you diagnose the problem?
What is the fundamental problem with the American people?
I don't know.
I mean, in one sense, I think probably most of them are just barely getting by.
So when things go really bad, they're only, you know, they're not much worse off than they were before.
It isn't like they have a big portfolio that took a hit.
And after all, they got to work all day.
Scott, everybody's got time to sit and read.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
But I mean, the middle class of this country is being decimated, middle class, frankly, being wiped out.
And that seems to me to be the objective of all of these moves.
And, you know, if the middle class doesn't even have the nostalgia for their once important position as the bulwark of our liberties, if they don't even have a nostalgic feeling about their ability to stand up and reclaim the country from these bad men, then I suppose you have to conclude that, you know, that all hope is lost.
I haven't reached that conclusion for sure, but it sure looks like it.
Yeah, well, I guess it depends on what time of day you ask me.
On one hand, more people know about this than ever before.
And, you know, I don't know exactly how all the news coverage was, say, during the stock market crash in 87, that kind of thing.
But I would imagine, you know, even I do remember in the 80s all the talk about the falling value of the dollar overseas and all that kind of thing.
And I don't remember anything like the kind of debate that we're having now where Glenn Beck is saying, gee, I think I might be becoming a John Bircher because I'm starting to think that these guys are doing this to us on purpose.
And I don't like this.
And even just the phrase, the printing of the money, the Fed, what they do, yeah, they turn around and print the money.
I mean, that's the kind of thing that never really was talked about.
All that stuff was in the category of too mysterious to discuss.
And now it is at least part of the debate, it seems like.
Well, you've put your finger right on the silver lining.
I talked with Lew Rockwell about this yesterday, that the biggest remarkable phenomenon out of the Ron Paul situation was the people's seeming understanding that the Fed is part of the problem.
And he said, yeah, you go to some of these Ron Paul rallies, you know, it's like in the Vietnam years, you know, students would stand up in front of the authorities or on the Capitol steps or wherever they, in front of the Justice Department and burn their draft cards.
And he said, you know, people were chanting, you know, eliminate the Fed, abolish the Fed, and burning dollar bills is a symbolic act.
That's, you know, by the time, if it is starting to penetrate to sort of the grassroots level that this is one of the main agencies of plunder, then, yeah, maybe we'll snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Well, now, so what about your callers?
You have this massive morning drive time audience there in Phoenix, Arizona, which is the something biggest city in America or something.
What do you hear from people?
Are they catching on or not?
Yeah, I suppose, but, you know, yeah, I mean, I think they're catching on, but, you know, in order to wake up, you know, it's like the Ron Paul campaign, everywhere he went, he got his 5%.
You know, well, it's nice that there's a spearhead of 5%, and 5% can be helpful if you get 5% of people really involved, 5% of people that care, 5% of people that will do something.
You know, that's helpful, but that means that there are 95% of the people out there still willing to be led.
And, you know, so I'm actually, I don't think that we're going to waken the American people until we land thud at the bottom.
Yeah, well, and, you know, see, that's the other worry, too, is on one hand, we have this Great Depression, say, see, we really have to have free markets, we have to bring our troops home and end all this imperial domination around the world, we have to cut the federal government's budget by two-thirds immediately, and these kinds of things, or we're just going to get another New Deal and another World War, that's what they got out of the last depression, we might even see an even further spiral down.
Well, I think that's ultimately what will happen, I mean, you know, I have friends that talk about, you know, let's, okay, let's have a revolution, if it's an intellectual revolution or some sort of political revolution, and, you know, let's get the worst of this over with and let's have a day of reckoning and the people will come to their senses and embrace, you know, freedom, liberty, prosperity, and I'm not sure that that's the case.
The one mega-trend that I see that is helpful is a massive trend of decentralization, and I mean, you know, decentralization of everything, decentralization of power and authority, decentralization of people's economic lives, decentralization of education, it's a wonderful thing, I think decentralization of churches and religions is a good thing, this massive tendency for decentralization is probably the most liberating tendency, because, you know, I mean, if you've got a group of people in the neighborhood that want to be little neighborhood socialists together and stuff, you know, that's fine, that's no skin off my nose, that's their business and not mine, so if people choose to make bad decisions in their little decentralized self, you know, it doesn't really impact me, as a matter of fact, I like to, yeah, go ahead, you experimented that at your own cost and you see just exactly how productive your little socialism is.
Well, I guess it is like the old Chinese parable about crisis and opportunity and they're kind of the same thing, and it just depends on who gets the upper hand.
We see, like, for example, like we were talking about, the Federal Reserve creates all these bubbles and pops them and you have all these panics and central banks around the world racing to get, you know, take care of things and all they do is get more power out of it, rather than the lesson being applied, and so I guess the question is really whether we can finally get enough of an understanding that when the crisis gets, whatever, a notch worse on the scale or whatever it is, that at some point we'll snap out of it and start getting back to the idea of people being free rather than turning to Washington, D.C. to solve everything.
Yeah, I mean, I think if we can at least keep, you know, diagnosing the problem, diagnosing the problem, I mean, you look at, like, Ron Paul's been diagnosing this for 30 years and everything he's said has come to pass and, you know, it's not as though we make a great deal of headway.
I remember him talking in the early 1980s about the Monetary Control Act that empowered the Fed to, instead of just monetizing the debt of the United States, instead of just using the indebtedness of the country as the creation for new liquidity, to use any kind of investment interest, I mean, the debt of the Iraqi government as the purported backing for the issuance of new currency, and Ron Paul would talk about the destruction of the dollar and what this meant and the hyperinflationary implications, and they've started to use that, and now we've got the same thing with the new Fed power grab and the idea that the Fed is going to be in charge of liquidity and stability and allowed to step in to prevent economic crisis and the chief engine of funding needs and market stability.
Good God, it's like you've got to raise the alarm all over again.
You know, this is 28 years later.
You've got to raise the alarm all over again that this is even a bigger and worse power grab than the one that went before, and you have to believe that they have designed this power grab at this time because they know there's going to be a wholesale economic chaos, and they're trying to get ahead of the curve so that they end up owning and controlling everything on the other side.
Yeah, see, that's the thing, is when everybody goes bankrupt, the people with the very most money who survive, the ones who don't hurdle themselves out the windows, they get to buy up all that property real cheap and make it for the long term, and then this is something I learned from Secrets of the Temple by William Grutter, which I guess is the Washington Post version of the creature from Jekyll Island, or the case against the Fed, or the case for it, or something.
Anyway, it's basically about the Volcker term in the 1980s and how after the Fed created all the inflation to pay for the Great Society and the war against millions and millions of people in Vietnam, they had the war against inflation.
Oh no, well now we got rid of that last goofball, I think it was Burns, and now we have Paul Volcker in here, and he's going to do the right thing and end inflation.
Well, but how does he do that?
He's got to crank interest rates through the roof, and they called it, this is supply side economics supposedly going on in the 1980s, but the problem was there was too much supply.
They needed a recession to shake off the excess supply, so all the money that was being made with the tax cuts and with the rich people just collecting the massive amounts of interest on their savings and investment and so forth, all that just went to buy diamond rings and Porsches.
It didn't go to invest in new factories, there were enough already, and companies were merging together all over the place, and so all that so-called supply side economics was really just demand side for the rich.
Well, this highlights something we were talking about on the show this morning.
There are signs now that the American consumers are starting to cut back on expenditures, you know, to save some money in case they don't have a job or conditions become really tough.
They see a little bit of the handwriting on the wall, and they're cutting back on spending.
They're cutting back on spending, cutting back on consumption to the extent they can, and trying to pay off credit card and trying to pay off debt.
This is exactly what the economy needs.
I mean, this is the healthiest thing in the world is the formation of capital, the reduction of debt, and so on.
It's a healthy response of people to the crisis we're in, but you know, the Republicans and the Democrats alike, the people in the Washington party, are calling the exact opposite tune.
Oh, you've got to spend, you've got to spend, you've got to go out, new trucks, new cars, spend the money, don't be afraid, go out there and spend, spend, spend.
And you know, the natural instinct of the people under the circumstances is to save money and to pay off debt, and that's, you know, that's exactly what we need, so the prescription from Washington is the exact opposite, as usual.
Hey, do you think back in 2002, if they had said that, hey, listen, we're not going to raise your taxes for this war, but it's going to end up costing trillions, but we're just going to debase the currency and destroy your savings and that kind of thing later on, and it'll end up costing you tens of thousands of dollars each, that sound like a good deal?
You think the American people would have still gone for it?
Yeah, they would have.
I mean, I don't think they were crazed enough in their war fever, I mean, I know we were telling them, you know, I was telling them, I mean, we were talking about it every day on my show, I don't know what, you know, I don't know what the mystery was.
It was, you know, Ron Paul was telling them about it, I mean, responsible people were telling them that the result of this thing would be an economic debacle and be a massive transfer of American wealth to petroleum-producing countries and petroleum-producing institutions and there would be a huge war premium on the price of oil and it would be a direct taxation on the American people.
I mean, we were telling them they didn't care, they didn't want to hear it.
In fact, raising those very objections, Scott, was called anti-American.
There are editorialists in major newspapers that said people that were talking like that must be terrorist lovers.
Yeah, well, because, you know, Al-Qaeda works with Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, yeah, please.
Well, I guess you're right.
Although, I don't know, I kind of, I try to, I guess this is the time of the day where I'm trying to have a little bit of hope and I think, well, you know, they really did push the idea that this war was going to be free and that lasted up until the first 87 billion, remember when people were shocked by the 87 billion, the first one, hundreds of billions of dollars ago.
But up until that point, the American people really had been sold that this war is going to be free.
And so I guess that means, it seems like the administration at least believed that that was one of the lies they had to sell in order to get the war that they wanted.
Well, I think that the cost of the war was like tertiary imports to people.
People just assume, well, you know, there will be a cost, but it won't be very much.
It's diffused.
The other guy will pay.
Somebody else will pay.
You know, we'll put a tax, we'll tax the profits of the petroleum companies or whatever madness they think of, you know, we'll tax somebody, somebody will pay.
And the administration knew this and the neocons knew this, that they weren't going to, you know, that the cost of the war wasn't going to be a stumbling block to them.
In fact, they knew very clearly that to sell the war, they had to come up with a specter of mushroom clouds.
And that's what turned the tide in my view.
It was, you know, it was the, to use Bush's word, it was the nuclear threat.
And speaking of 2002, you tried to tell them.
Who was it you were trying to tell and how'd they react to that specifically?
Oh God, it's kind of an old story.
Oh, tell the story.
The people, they don't all know it.
They want to hear it.
Yeah, well, I guess in a nutshell, oh, come on, hey, wait, wait, it's a heroic story, Charles.
Come on.
You want me to tell it or what?
No, I'll tell it.
I'll give you the thumbnail version of it.
All right.
But I was doing afternoon drive on a big talk station here in Phoenix.
There's the talk station owned by Clear Channel Communications, which owns the Rush Limbaugh show and others.
And I'm on there with a bunch of war fever talk show hosts.
And I mean all of them, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to every, even the other local guys and they're all war fever.
Now I'm trying, you know, I'm talking to guys like Chalmers Johnson and I'm trying to talk people, some sense of the people and talking, you know, with Gordon Prather and Ray McGovern and every, every representation that the administration would make, whether it was, I don't know, whether it was aluminum tubes or whatever it was, one representation about, about Iraq and their threat to the American people and Al Qaeda, we'd knock it down day after day after day, we'd knock it down.
And for my troubles, I got, you know, called by my fellows, you know, a terrorist lover, a Saddam Hussein lover, editorial pages here in Phoenix, you know, singled me out for, you know, hating America and loving Saddam Hussein.
And it got really ugly.
And in addition to all the death threats, you know, I have corporate stooges, you know, calling me in the conference room, ordering me to change my position.
I get one national officer of the corporation, you know, actually, this was kind of the funny part.
Actually, the sad part of the story is that several of the people that were ordering me to get into lockstep, into goose step with the administration on the war, some of them would privately say to me in the hallways, things like, you know, Charles, like, personally, I agree with what you're saying, but, you know, we can't talk like that.
I had a corporate officer, a national level corporate officer, all the radio people that listen to this show will know who it is, who called me one day and he said, well, you know, Charles, I personally, I personally agree with you about the folly of this war.
And he called me later that night at home on my home phone and left a message that said, don't tell anybody what I told you, because nobody thinks, nobody knows that about me.
So it was exactly a period of profiles and courage.
Even the people that knew that we were being sold a bill of goods, I mean, you know, this is what Eleanor Clift said at the time about the congressional authorization, such as it was in October of 2002 for the elective war.
She said, you know, if you talk to these guys in private that voted for this thing, if the vote had been taken in secret, it never would have passed because they knew better.
But it was a really dark period and, you know, I was ordered to drop my opposition to the war and, of course, you know, I'm not that kind of guy and so I didn't.
And it continued to get excessively ugly and, you know, I mean, they could have done the honorable thing.
They could have just, you know, paid off my contract and sent me on my way.
But anyway, it was a really bad period, and, you know, I don't even think of it.
Here's the reason I've kind of washed it out of my mind, I'm a little reluctant to bring it up sometimes, Scott, is this, that ultimately I don't think radio executives are any different than any of the other American people that were scared into thinking that Saddam Hussein could fly over here and drop nukes on us in 45 minutes.
You know, they knew what they were seeing on Fox TV.
They knew what they were hearing from guys like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
And they didn't know any better, and they weren't any brighter, and it's just like you were talking about earlier, you know, about, you know, the working people of America that, you know, they're busy trying to keep food on their families, in Bush's words, and keep the bills paid.
So they didn't know, and they're told all this stuff, and I used to get that from callers at the time.
They'd go, you know, I'd refute some of the representations, the ever-evolving new daily representations about the need for war.
And somebody would call up and say, yeah, Charles, I understand what you're saying, but don't you think maybe the president knows something secret that we don't know?
Oh, yeah.
But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I'm like, I've totally forgiven all of those people.
The radio executives, the programming people, the consultants, all those people that made my life a living hell during that period, because they weren't the source of the lies.
You know, they were just the sheep that went along with what they were told.
Yeah, I haven't forgiven the people that invented the lies, that in a calculated manner went off to sell the American people a war that we didn't need, that wouldn't accomplish what they said it would, and was for reasons other than what the American people were told it was.
So, I mean, those are the criminal parties that I think, you know, one of these days we need war crimes trials for.
Yeah.
Well, you know, a couple of things there.
On one hand, I can see, you know, all your colleagues, you looking at them as just sheep like everybody else, but they have a lot greater responsibility, one that you lived up to, because they're not just a bunch of goofballs at the office, they're a bunch of goofballs at the office who are talking on the radio all day, and who are, you know, putting across things that are supposedly true.
I know here in town, the biggest AM station got rid of ABC and put Fox News at the top of the hour.
Yeah.
So, you know, that kind of thing, and there is responsibility there.
I mean, they were willing members of the propaganda arm.
The other thing I wanted to say was that you left out of the story, the really cool part, I think, is that the local Air America affiliate said, oh, you don't want Charles, we'll take him.
Yeah, that was kind of interesting, and it was a very fun period of radio for me, actually, with the Air America affiliate, because, you know, I'm kind of under the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
They gave me the morning show there, and actually, you know, it's a conundrum that a lot of us libertarians find ourselves in.
When the liberals or the Democrats are in charge, we end up making some alliances with the Republicans or the Conservatives to stop the excesses of the left and the Democrats, and when the Republicans or the Conservatives are running things, you know, we end up making alliances with the left or the Democrats to stop some of the excesses.
So it was a period in which, you know, so helped me, I even hoped against hope that Democrats would be elected in 2006 and maybe put a stop to the war, but, you know, I'm not terminally naive, I can be hopeful at times, but, you know, I wasn't sure that something like that would happen, and of course it hasn't.
Yeah, well, I never look for alliances on the left among politicians.
There are a lot of great writers and people out there who, you know, hopefully we're a good influence on them or something.
Well, you know, I do see a lot of convergence, and I, you know, try to cheerlead it when I can of the people on the left and the people on the right, when they, you know, they start kind of...
I mean, I had somebody that was, I remember to be a real Second Amendment opponent, a real hardcore liberal here in the Arizona community, you know, a couple of years into the Patriot Act and stuff of this, and said to me one day, you know, he said, Charles, now I'm beginning to understand why the people might want to have guns.
You know, I mean, you never know when, you know, when all of your freedoms are flushed down the drain.
Right, I remember there was even an article in TomPain.com a few years ago called, uh, Rethinking Federalism, and, you know, maybe states' rights isn't just a code word for hating black people.
Yeah.
And, you know, like you're saying, decentralization, repeal and decentralization, that's the path to liberty one way or another.
If we're going to have our universal rights, we have to enforce them from the bottom up.
Hey, have you noticed how everybody's trying to wrap themselves in the name of libertarianism these days?
True.
There's a lot of that going around, isn't there?
I'm thinking about Mike Revell.
I heard Jesse Ventura was talking kindly about Ron Paul on Larry King's show last night.
Oh, really?
That's good.
Yeah.
Ron Paul had it right.
You know, we just marched in.
We should just march out.
So, uh, we, you know, we've, I mean, I guess we've lived long enough to become very, very trendy, Scott.
Oh, well, there you go.
Let's hope that, uh, the influence of people like Neil Bortz and so forth can be overcome and people will understand that libertarianism is actually a synonym for opposition to imperialism and aggressive warfare.
Yeah, here, here.
Yeah, you're right.
There are a lot of wolves in sheep's clothing.
There are a lot of people passing themselves off under the, uh, the very trendy name now of libertarianism who are nothing but servants of the state.
It's amazing to me to see the people that call themselves libertarian these days.
Yeah, well, it's, um, it's kind of consequence, right?
The more popular we get, the more diluted our membership is.
So we just have to stay plumb line and make sure never to endorse or give the benefit of the doubt to any government activity of any kind.
Yeah, here, here.
Here, here.
And that should be easy since they're wrong about everything, you know.
Well, I mean, if you don't think social relationships should be conditioned by force and coercion, you think social relationships should be mutual and voluntarily entered into, then the case for the state becomes awfully damn thin.
All right, everybody, that's Charles Goy at 1100 AM, KFNX in Phoenix, Arizona, antiwar.com slash radio.
Thanks very much, Charles.
Scott, it's always great to talk to you.
Look forward to having you on my show soon.
Great.
I look forward to it as well.
Okay.
