11/04/10 – Cindy Sheehan – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
We're streaming from antiwar.com/radio, for example.
More places than that, I can't keep track of them all.
Alright, next guest is Cindy Sheehan.
She's the peace mom.
Welcome back to the show, Cindy, how are you doing?
Hi Scott, it's great to be back on the show again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and I'm glad to hear that you're feeling a little bit better from yesterday.
Everybody should know that they can check out your website at cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com, right?
And peaceoftheaction.org?
Yeah, the blogspot is where I keep my blogs, and then my radio show is at cindysheehanssoapbox.com.
There you go, oh yeah, I forgot to say the radio show too.
Yeah.
Which I like, I've listened to it quite a few times actually.
Oh, thank you.
So you also have this piece in Al Jazeera, the real Al Jazeera, .net that is, US myth of the two-party system.
Yes, I'm actually writing a regular column for Al Jazeera English now, and it's going really well.
Oh, congratulations, that's great to hear.
I write a couple columns a month for them now.
Oh, how many have there been so far?
Three.
So I talked about the injustice in the age of Obama was my first article in Al Jazeera, and we talked about the, I'm sorry, that was called dissent in the age of Obama.
We talked about the FBI raids, well I talked about the FBI raids on peace activists, and then my second one is about the case of Dr. Sia Siddiqui, who is a Pakistani who was living in the United States before 9-11.
She was educated at Brandeis and at MIT.
After 9-11, her and her husband moved back to Pakistan because they had children.
They were afraid, rightly afraid, of Muslim backlash after 9-11.
And then she was implicated by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when he was tortured over almost 200 times in one month.
He was waterboarded, and he said her name once.
So she was implicated, and to make a long story short, they brought her back to the United States, tried her, and she got 86 years plus life in prison.
So I would really encourage people to go to Al Jazeera and read my article, Injustice in the Age of Obama.
And I just want to point out to everybody that, you know, the two-party system is a sham, and that no matter who's in power, the policies are still continuing.
But there's still too many people who buy into the myth of the two-party system, and that was my last article in Al Jazeera was called The Myth of the Two-Party System.
Right, which was great, and it asks the question here in the sub-headline, would America look much different if Republican John McCain had beaten Democrat Barack Obama to become president?
And so what do you think?
How do you measure that?
Well, I don't think it would be.
It would look that much different because it sure doesn't look much different when we have a Democrat Barack Obama than when George Bush was president, except that, you know, many things have gotten worse.
Unemployment's gotten worse.
The foreclosure crisis has become worse.
The wars have gotten worse.
He's tripled troop strength to Afghanistan.
The drone bombings in Pakistan have gone up 300% in real numbers in the less than two years that Barack Obama's been president.
He's declared himself jury and executioner over any American citizen without a fair trial.
I mean, it's just I can't really think how things could be much worse if McCain was president.
And then you have to think, too, if McCain had won the presidency, which, of course, he wasn't supposed to win, but if he had won the presidency, there theoretically would have been an opposition Congress, and there theoretically would have been an opposition in the grassroots movement.
We might have been able to rekindle some kind of an anti-war movement if John McCain had won.
But now Barack Obama and the Democrats, their purpose, I think, is to kill these social anti-war movements, to co-opt them and to just render them irrelevant and ineffective.
And they've been very good at doing that.
Well, you know, and if you look at the recent past, like, say, for example, how the Democrats took the House in the first place in 2006, it seems like the principle of endless warfare always outranks even the interests of the Democratic Party itself.
John V. Walsh at Counterpunch did excellent work on the fact that Rahm Emanuel, from his position in the House of Representatives, worked to undermine every anti-war Democrat in the primaries in 2006 and support the pro-war Democrat.
And in every case where he succeeded in doing so, the pro-war Democrat lost the general against the Republican.
And the anti-war Democrats that he failed to defeat in the primaries all won.
But they wanted as few anti-war voices in the Democratic Party and the House of Representatives as they could possibly get.
And they're determined from the get-go to betray what they promised their constituents, which is that, oh, yeah, it'll look like Daily Kos around here or something once we're in power.
Well, and the thing is, too, with these recent elections is that there were still a few people who were very outspoken and openly anti-war in Congress.
And two of those people were defeated.
Alan Grayson, whom we both know is not perfect, but he was a voice, an anti-war voice, and Russ Feingold.
They were both defeated.
And I just think it is the plan of the regime to just more and more become the parties become almost indistinguishable from each other.
But they still serve a purpose.
They serve a purpose where the Republicans might be able to come in now and extend the tax cuts, which, you know, we can argue about that.
But, you know, they could be able to invade Iran now, could be able to just push harsher austerity measures here in the United States, where the Democratic Congress would have gotten more slack for that.
But now there's the Republicans, and that's what their Republican base put them in to do.
And now Barack Obama can say, I didn't want to do it, but the Republicans made me.
And then the Republicans can, you know, conversely also say, well, we wanted to reform the health care legislation, but the president vetoed it.
So they just play this game to support each other, support the establishment, support the elites, while keep robbing us.
Because most of the people in, you know, in our class, they believe that there is a difference between the parties and that Barack Obama really would do good if he could.
But for the last two years, he had a super majority, and they didn't end the wars or pass any progressive legislation.
But they still blame the Republicans, even though the Republicans were in, you know, a distinct minority for the last two years.
Well, and when Bush controlled both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court for years on end, during the first years of his presidency, before the election of 2006, they didn't do anything that are the good things that supposedly the Republicans want to do for their right-wing constituents, because the Democrats just won't let us or whatever.
It's the very same thing.
Right, well, it was like my friend, after Casey was killed in 2004, George Bush was up for re-election, and my friends that I had before Casey was killed were telling me, oh, we're going to support him because he's pro-life, and he's going to overturn Roe v.
Wade.
I was like, well, you know, he's president now for four years, how come, and he has a Republican Congress, how come there has been no steps to overturn Roe v.
Wade?
Yeah, right, well, because, of course, the Republicans need that issue to keep the suckers coming to the polls for them.
If they were to change it, then why would these people have any reason to support them anymore?
It would be a chunk – they might lose their permanent Republican majority or whatever.
Exactly.
So, yep, and, you know, it always works so well, and it's funny because ten years before I was born, Carol Quigley, professor of international relations at Georgetown, author of Tragedy and Hope, wrote in there that basically the only reason we have a two-party system with the one party supposedly to represent the interests of the liberals and the conservatives so the American people can throw those rascals out every eight or even four years if necessary without ever leading to a substantial shift in policy, but half the people are mad and then relieved half the time, and they just switch back and forth forever.
Right.
You can just continue to work like that, you know, on indefinite item or whatever, and it's amazing, though, that now it's only been two years, right, since George Bush was torturing people to death or whatever, and people think, oh, yeah, this Barack Obama thing has got to get checked.
We've got to put the Republicans in power.
Like, the Republicans, you don't remember them from two years ago?
But that's all we have, and so half the people are relieved that at least, you know, now the Republicans control the House or whatever, those who had been angry.
So it's not even half the people.
When you think that only 30% of the people vote, you know, it's a very small minority.
True.
Absolutely.
All right, well, hold it there.
We're already over on the LRM break.
We'll play a song for the Chaos Radio audience here, Cindy, and then we'll be back.
It's Cindy Sheehan, the Peace Mom.
Check out Peace, spelled correctly, peaceoftheaction.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott, and I'm talking on the phone with Cindy Sheehan.
She's the Peace Mom.
Peaceoftheaction.org.
And Cindy Sheehan's soapbox for her blog and her radio show.
And we're talking about this bogus scam that ought to be as transparent as saran wrap, this ridiculous two-party system and this ridiculous left-right fight, when the fight is between power and those who ain't got it.
Ain't that right, Cindy?
Right.
Well, you know what they say, the only valid war is a class war.
And there's never going to be one of those while the people in our, the ones without power, as you say, keep on buying their myths and keep on, you know, being codependent with them.
I'm going to Europe.
I'm leaving tonight.
And I'm going to go and I'm going to meet with activists in London and in Dublin and in Athens.
And they've been organizing the people around these austerity measures that really, the austerity measures are really being opposed by the World Bank and the IMF.
And they want to place austerity measures on us.
But, of course, the ruling class or the elites or the robber class, as I call them, the banksters, the military industrial complex, the government, the wars, the billions of dollars that we spend every month on war, they're not going to cut back on those things.
If there's going to be tough austerity measures to get the economy back on track, then it should be across the board.
Everybody should be asked.
But the people on the lower end of the economic scale shouldn't be asked to bear the burden for the people on the top.
Because it's not like they're – in the bottom, when we have austerity measures, when we don't have money, it's a choice between food or medicine or gas or electricity.
It's not the choice whether we're going to buy another yacht or a mansion.
So it's just ridiculous that we continually, especially here in the United States, we continually allow the robber class to rob us without putting our feet down and saying, no, that you're not entitled to our prosperity.
You're not entitled.
Right on.
Well, you know, there's a lot of point of agreement there, and I know that you're in favor of government programs for people in ways that – Oh, no.
All right, well, we lost Cindy Sheehan.
That's a darn shame.
I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to cue up some audio, and then I'm going to get her back on the line.
I guess the telephone line didn't like a lefty and a libertarian agreeing about class war with, you know, subtle differences worth describing.
I was about to.
All right, well, hang on.
I'm going to cue up something for you all to listen to here, and then I'm going to be back with Cindy Sheehan on the show right after this.
All right, well, god dang, straight to voicemail.
Telephone problems with Cindy Sheehan.
I guess we'll just have to wrap up that interview another time.