For those of you who just listened to Anti-War Radio on the podcast feed, I'll let you know that you can find the archive of the pilot show I did for KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, the Pacifica station, which ran on November 17th, if you go to antiwar.com slash radio, for interviews of Scott Ritter, James Bamford, and Glenn Greenwald, and we'd like to thank you for your support.
For Anti-War.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest on the show is David Swanson.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Wonderful.
Great to be here.
Well, I appreciate you joining us on the show, and I'll let everybody know that, first of all, your book is called Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.
You're the founder of AfterDowningStreet.org.
I'm sorry I don't have a button to play the round of applause sound effect here for you for that, but you get applause from me for it.
Also, I wanted to let people know that if you're listening here in LA, there's going to be an event on, I think this is Monday, right, at 7.30 p.m.?
Yeah, Monday, the 23rd, 7.30 p.m. at some place in Mar Vista.
Yeah, at St. Bede's Church, or St. Bede's Church or something, in Mar Vista.
That's 3590 Grandview Boulevard in Mar Vista, just south of the 10 there here in LA.
Great, so I hope I can come out and see it myself.
That would be wonderful to see you there in person, and lots of good friends of mine and people I never get to see in person will be there, and Marcy Winograd, who's running for Congress, will be there, and Vincent Fugliosi, who's trying to put Bush in jail for murder, will be there.
Very interesting.
Lots of great people.
I hope everyone in LA turns out.
All right, so let's get to the question that Wayne Morris was answering there about the power of the presidency, and I guess I'll just get you started off with the first sentence of Article I is not about the President, it's about the Congress, and it says that all legislative powers belong to them, but there must be something in Article II that says that the President gets to do whatever he wants when it comes to foreign affairs, right?
Yeah, there's not.
I'm doing this book tour, and I've been to 30 cities out of 50 so far, and most of them I've asked, does anyone know what Article I of the Constitution is about?
And at most I get one person who can tell me that it's about the Congress, that the first 60% of our Constitution is about the Congress, that the people who wrote this thing gave just about every power they could think of to the Congress.
Now the President can interact with foreign heads of state and can negotiate treaties, but they have to be approved by two-thirds of senators present, unlike the current treaty with Iraq, which has never been run by the Senate.
And the Congress has the exclusive power to decide when and where we have wars.
The President is to serve as Commander-in-Chief during a time of war.
So in a situation like this one, where there's a question of whether to dramatically escalate a war, a war that has never been constitutionally declared, a war that's been authorized with a vague authorization that has lost all relevance to the endless ongoing occupation there, it's absolutely unconstitutional for Congress to be shirking its duty to say, we will allow and fund un-escalation or we will not, rather than simply being expected to pay for whatever the President decides to do.
All right.
So if we had a constitutional government, what would the President's role look like as compared to what it is now?
I mean, I'd like very much to go through, you know, the Bush administration revolution and all the signing statements and all those different things.
But I guess I'd like to know what you think the Presidency actually is as described by Article 2.
Well, it ought to be an executive of the will of Congress.
That is, the President is required in Article 2 to see that the laws as written and passed by Congress are faithfully executed.
He can veto.
His veto can be overridden or he can sign and obey.
That's it.
So certainly signing statements, altering laws, executive orders, making laws, the President telling the Congress what laws to make, which is the norm, the President telling lawyers to make secret laws in memos to legalize blatant crimes, the President making treaties without Congress, making appointments without Congress, spending money without Congress, spending money in secret from elsewhere to begin an invasion of a place like Iraq with no repercussions, the Federal Reserve spending money without Congress, you know, it's a very different world with lots of different things accepted as the norm now than what the Constitution lays out and lays out very well, a strong legislature that raises and spends every dime and makes every law, and an executive who executes the will of that legislature, and in addition serves as Commander-in-Chief in a time and place as determined and funded by the Congress.
And of course, we now have a standing military and a military standing in many other people's countries, which is a very different situation from the expectations of the Constitution, but the Founders very much saw the dangers that we are now developing, and very specifically put the power to make war in the hands of someone other than the Commander-in-Chief.
Well, you know, it's interesting the way you talk about the standing army standing around in other people's countries.
I mean, if we think that our President is a dictator here, which he virtually is, just think of what a dictator is in other people's countries, where there's no semblance whatsoever of even pretended legislative supremacy or whatever, where everything is carried out through the chain of military command.
That's why I guess back, especially in 2004, people all over the world were saying on the Internet, well, we want to vote in your election, he's our President too, how come we don't get to vote?
It's an excellent question.
Of course, a lot of Americans don't get to vote either, but it's an excellent question, and our elections would go better, and we would elect better people if we let the people of the world vote in them, and it makes a certain amount of sense, although it would make more sense for us to shut down the empire of bases and simply be a nation unto itself among equals, but that's a distant goal.
We are building new bases in Colombia, new bases in Guam, new bases in South Korea, new bases in Italy, where I used to live, and it used to be you could say I'm an American and it was like saying I'm a movie star and people loved you, and such anger has been created, and that's the effect of these bases that we have in the better part of the nations around the world, and that's the first line of interaction most people have with the United States, with our bases occupying their countries, producing great animosity at great cost, and I could think of useful things to do with $140 billion or so a year that instead we are spending on this empire of bases that is expanding and expanding with the biggest bases anywhere now in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm talking with David Swanson, he's the author of Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, you can find his website at afterdowningstreet.org, and at the risk of getting the rest of this interview off on the wrong foot here, I've got to tell you David why I hate democracy so much, and that is the poll today says that 54% of the American people want the 5th and 6th amendments, if not to be repealed, to at least be ignored and treated as not law, and that anyone accused by the executive branch of being a terrorist is already guilty of being a terrorist, and they ought to be convicted as such by a military tribunal and then put up against the wall and shot.
And I think about, I was actually accidentally there paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, declared not law, that was what he wanted the people to do after Marbury versus Madison, where the Supreme Court decided that they were the final say in all constitutional arguments forever.
And he said this is absolutely ridiculous, it ought to be brought out before the American people and declared not law.
Well that's what the American people want to happen to the 5th and 6th amendments.
So, you know, I don't know, why should we think that as you make the case in your book that if we devolve this power back into the hands of the American people somehow, why should they use it any better?
I mean here we have our imperial president is trying to cool things off with Iran while the Congress wants to nuke them.
I mean I'm kind of happy that even George Bush was there to prevent the Congress from nuking Iran, you know?
You make several good points.
I've not seen the poll you're referring to, I'm not doubting it, but I have seen polls over the years, in recent years, that show much wiser opinions than those from the American people on Magna Carta type rights, rights of the accused in our judicial system.
You know, taking dictatorial power away from the president and giving it to the Congress would not mean peace, joy, and harmony, and rainbows and flowers, at least not immediately.
The Congress is a disaster, but leaving it in the hands of one person gives us absolutely no hope of a progressive or a democratic, with a small d, future in our country.
Giving the power to the Congress and cleaning up the Congress, cleaning up the money influence and the party domination and the media influence and the rest of it, so that we truly are represented, gives me some hope of a better outlook.
But giving pure majority power without any protection of minority rights to the public is not my ideal either.
I want majority rule, but I want minority rights protected, and I want real freedom of the press, so that we actually have an informed public.
You know, you can't rely on majority decision making when the majority is badly misinformed, and that is a serious problem in our country.
But all of that being recognized, I think the most serious deficiency in our so-called representative republic is that the majority will is almost never represented.
And it's true that a majority would have taken us into Iraq, but it would have only lasted a year, not seven or eight years, and perhaps many more.
And on most issues of peace and justice and priorities of where we devote our resources, and even of civil rights, the majority is far ahead of either the Congress or the President in most cases.
All right, now, I guess I want to get to, well, there's so many different topics.
It's such a great book.
I really recommend everybody read it, no matter what your political perspective is.
This is important stuff.
And I guess I'll go ahead and skip sort of toward the end here, actually, and talk about what I like to see as some sort of new realignment, where libertarian abolitionists like myself, where progressives like you, where conservatives like you'll find at the American Conservative Magazine, where we can kind of realign and be the real moderates in the political argument, in the broader discussion, because we're the ones who are against everything that the government wants to do that's terrible, like lock people away without trials, start wars.
The libertarians, I think, are the real moderate center, and you're the real moderate progressive in the sense of you're against all this widespread violence.
I mean, that's moderation to me.
And so we see Joe Lieberman and John McCain somehow get the title of moderate, when in fact they're the most extremist people in our society.
They're for every terrible thing that our government wants to do to people.
So I'm interested in all the differences and sames here, and I guess I'm trying to cultivate the idea that people on the progressive left who care about peace and the Bill of Rights, and people on the right, I guess the paleo-conservative right, who care about peace and the Bill of Rights, and the libertarians who care about peace and the Bill of Rights, that we can all be somehow the new coalition, even if it's a minority coalition, that we can really get our act together, put the most important priorities, like peace and the Bill of Rights first, and leave some of the other arguments aside so that we can take care of the most important things first.
I guess I wonder what you think about that, and then maybe we can talk a little bit more about the process of how to clean up, as you talk about in your book, how we pick our House of Representatives and things like that.
Well, in terms of people outside of the beltway, not talking about elected officials, but in terms of people, we can have a huge majority coalition.
We have a huge majority against a lot of important things, and for a lot of important things.
We're against the corruption.
If this Supreme Court ruling comes down that says no limits on bribery, as the human right of free speech for corporations to bribe our elected officials, we have a potential for a majority of intense outrage there.
We have a majority against the Wall Street bailouts.
We have a majority against the nature of the corporate media.
We have a majority against the party dominance of our system, and the gerrymandering, and the ballot access, and the inability to unelect anybody.
We have a majority for civil rights and basic rights that are being stripped away by our government, at least in moments when not enough people are scared out of their wits by war talk to hand over their rights.
And so, I think, you know, just as we have to drop this idea that some elected official or some party is good or bad in total, and we're on their team or we're against them, you know, we have to work on issues, and an elected official can be good on one issue and bad on another, and we have to work in coalitions with people on things we agree about and agree to disagree about other things.
So, you know, I have strong disagreements with libertarians.
I want to see our government invest in green energy, and jobs, and health care, and, you know, and I'm sick to death of hearing from people who, you know, don't want to pay for someone else's health care when we're all paying more right now to fund executive salaries and waste and advertising by insurance companies than anybody would have to pay if we had a civilized health care system.
But when it comes to opposing abuses of power and opposing illegal and aggressive wars and war crimes, it tends to be libertarians who are doing better work than anybody else.
And for me, not to want to work with them would be crazy.
Right.
Well, and I got to tell you, at least from my own point of view, and certainly I know I represent antiwar.com when I say this, I don't care at all about the economic issues where we disagree.
I want only to be friends about these, about every, you know, the things that are important, peace and, you know, trials before prison and things like that.
And we can argue about economics all day long, starting in, you know, 15 years from now when we've gotten this madness straightened out.
We can, although our economy is a wreck.
But we agree, actually, on one of the key moves needed to save our economy, because our economy is being hollowed out by investing all of our resources in the military and wars.
And if we can get away from that, you know, if we can get away from investing all of our money in wars and the military and Wall Street, you know, libertarians who oppose all spending of money would actually see a significant improvement if we were investing in public education and health care and jobs and green energy, rather than Wall Street and the military and wars, because we would have lots of money left over.
The things I want to spend money on actually cost less than the things we're now spending money on.
All right.
Now, I wonder what you think about the argument that goes on, I guess, on circles way above our pay grade here, the level of activism we're at, but, you know, the establishment, the party Democrats and the party conservatives, party Republicans there, they have this legal argument about the living Constitution versus the Constitution in exile.
And I guess Al Gore, for example, has explicitly used the term living Constitution.
And what he means by that is that the Constitution says that there can be a Congress, a president and a Supreme Court, and that they can do whatever they want and that none of the rest of the words in there mean anything because it's alive.
And so it's just a it means it's dead, really means it's a blank check.
And then on the other side, you have the Constitution is in exile and we need to bring it back.
And yet those are the people who say that if you read the Constitution, the only thing in there is the commander in chief clause where the president is the dictator of the world and no other single word or letter in there means anything, that the Constitution is in fact dead.
And it seems like that is where the argument between left and right interpretations of the Constitution exists now.
And I wonder, you know, where you see yourself on that continuum, if at all, or or, you know, how you how that fight among those among our philosopher kings, you know, washes out where when it comes to the after Downing Street level.
Well, fortunately, there are exceptions to both of those absurd and criminal and lawless and destructive views of the world.
And there are exceptions among Republicans like Bruce Fine.
And there are exceptions among Democrats like Gerald Nadler on a good day.
And there are many exceptions among people whose top loyalty is not to one of those parties.
But needless to say, I agree with with your summaries of both of those views.
I mean, I think you accurately depict them as absurd in your question.
But I think we we have to have a written standard of law.
If we are going to have a society of laws at all, it can't just be what the current president says.
And so to have a situation where a president can tell a lawyer to draft a memo, throwing out huge chunks of the Constitution and have the next president treat that as the law is to give absolute power to a series of of kings, which is a very, very different proposition from having the rule of law under the Constitution.
The Constitution badly needs to be improved, but it has to be improved in writing, not just improved at the whim of someone who wants to toss it aside.
In writing, you mean by amendment?
Yes, I mean, by amendment, by law, you can't just toss it out.
I mean, we we've gone decades without recognizing Congress's constitutional right and duty to decide when and where we have wars.
But to propose that we that we more officially sanction ignoring that part of the Constitution is is to open the door to ignoring other parts.
And there are parts that are still in good standing, and that is reckless and dangerous.
So you saw this proposal about a year ago from Lee Hamilton and Ed Meese and gang on how to reform the War Powers Act by requiring that the president consult with Congress before launching an illegal war.
And that's the role Congress wants.
It just wants to talk.
It just wants to be consultants.
But the Constitution imposes a duty on Congress to actually hold the powers of war and and use them wisely.
And and that's our only chance.
Well, you know, there was a hilarious back and forth there between Ron Paul and James Baker, who was part of the gang you were describing there.
Yes.
And and James Baker, who, of course, was secretary of state during the aggressive invasion of of Panama and of Iraq, both of them without congressional declarations of war, was making the case that we've got to move to limit the president's power.
And while this isn't perfect, at least it's got a little bit more requirement in it than the current War Powers Act has or something like that.
And Ron Paul is saying, yeah, but the Constitution says that Congress is supposed to declare war and so and that the president doesn't have the authority to do that.
And basically, James Baker is trying to make the case to Ron Paul that we need this half measure in order to stop me before I kill again.
Right.
And what James Baker and gang were proposing was to further weaken.
I mean, the War Powers Act weakens the Constitution by saying you can launch a war at your whim for 60 days and then come ask us about it.
What James Baker was proposing was to was to further weaken that and to say that you don't have to get our approval.
We the Congress, you don't have to get our approval at all.
You can consult with us.
And that's the role Congress wants.
They don't want to vote on controversial issues.
They want to leave it up to the president.
If we could persuade them to raise hell about the fact that the Iraqi people are being denied their vote on the occupation of their country, that they were promised by last July and promised again for next January, maybe they would be willing to pass the buck to the Iraqi people.
In any case, what Congress members want to do is to pass the buck.
But we can't allow them to do that.
We have to force them to have and use power on our behalf.
And then we have to force them to use it correctly.
All right, now, on domestic policy, I want to ask you a bit about federalism here.
And I think probably everybody in this society knows whether they lament the fact or not or have no opinion that the white supremacists, American totalitarians in the South, completely abused and apparently destroyed forever the doctrine of the reserve powers of the states known as states rights for the shorthand, I guess, even though states don't have rights.
But they basically destroyed that by hiding behind it and saying that it's none of the federal government's business what their local civil rights laws are or are not.
But so now we see examples of things like the rights of people to smoke weed if they want to, particularly if they have a doctor's prescription in states like California.
And the Obama administration, Eric Holder, actually, I don't know if they're respecting just politics or if they're actually respecting the Tenth Amendment, but they're basically going with the Tenth Amendment and saying that if California legalizes weed, unlike in John Ashcroft's interpretation, unlike Alberto Gonzalez or or John McCain was a John McKay's way of interpreting things.
They're going to go ahead and recognize that they don't have the authority to overrule state pot laws.
And I wonder whether you think that perhaps that could be the beginning of the turnaround of liberal opinion about federalism, because after all, if we really are saying that the Constitution is the law, the Sixth Amendment means what it says, well, then, you know, the first seven articles there, they don't describe this federal Leviathan at all.
I mean, they describe I mean, it's national Leviathan.
They describe a federal system where the national government has very little, little authority over actual individual human lives in the society at all.
This is almost all the reserve powers of the states.
If the Tenth Amendment means what it says, for example, or if the necessary and proper clause means what it says, when it says that Congress has the power to pass laws to enact these listed foregoing powers that we just told you.
Yes, well, that the Amendment 10 says the power is not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.
And I think that on both sides or all sides of the political spectrum, you have that recognized selectively depending on the issue, depending on on what is is useful.
I think there's very little principled stand for that amendment.
And there should be more.
And I think you may see more from the left side of politics, particularly as we come to the realization that the Democrats have been given all the power in Washington and chosen to do nothing useful with it from from most political points of view, nothing useful at all.
And and what we're seeing is a situation where if any good is going to come, it's going to come from the states first.
We're seeing states begin to clean up the campaign bribery system.
We may see states improve the health care system first, although you saw President Obama tell Congressman George Miller and Nancy Pelosi to kill Congressman Kucinich's amendment, which would have facilitated allowing states to provide their residents with health care.
We may see a fight over that because that is arguably unconstitutional.
Of course, it's also arguably unconstitutional to require that people give their money to health insurance companies, as we may see in a bill that does get passed.
It's also look, it's unconstitutional to give farmers subsidies, for example.
I mean, look, in the 1930s, they threatened FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court and they finally relented.
And they rule that a man was guilty of a felony criminal violation for growing wheat on his own property, sell to his own family under the excuse that that somehow would affect the interstate market in wheat.
And therefore, Congress was within its authority to prosecute this guy for growing wheat on his own land to feed to his own family.
And that was the precedent set.
And the rule since then has been Congress can do whatever it wants.
And it was the liberal New Deal, what should we do, dad?
And on from there, where all this came from.
So the question is, can can liberals admit that the Constitution does not provide for this post New Deal federal leviathan?
And that if it's the law and we're going to go by it, then we have to repeal it.
That the necessary and proper clause does not say that Congress can do whatever it wants.
Certainly some can.
Certainly I do.
It's it's hard to get it's hard to predict people asking, acting on a general principle as opposed to how people will act on a particular issue.
But I think that you can predict a general trend of more people focusing on local and state actions in an attempt to save some sort of of sanity in our politics.
Because of the degree to which Washington has become such a hopeless battleground for people from all political perspectives.
And you sadly, you see people retreat to working on their little organic farm and ceasing engagement in state or national issues at all.
And I don't advocate that we have to work locally and nationally.
But I think we are going to see more and more efforts to achieve what's needed at the state level and try to push it up from there.
Well, what about the principles of 98, 18, 17, 98?
The Kentucky and Virginia resolutions that said that states that Marbury versus Madison was wrong and that states have the right to nullify federal laws.
Like I got an example of an unconstitutional federal law, the Department of Homeland Security Authorization Act of 2002.
Absolutely unconstitutional.
Should a state have the right to nullify that law and kick the DHS out of their state?
It's not something I could give an easy yes or no answer across the board.
And I'm certainly I'm not an expert on the issue, but I wouldn't reject it out of hand.
And we've seen efforts at the local and state levels to challenge abuses of the Patriot Act.
We've seen efforts to challenge the use of of militias of the National Guard to fight foreign wars of empire.
And I expect to see more such resistance from the local and state levels.
And I think in many cases, that's good.
On the other hand, with laws that that are constitutional, the Constitution does give federal law supremacy over state and local.
Now, I'm sorry for being such a jerk.
I'm only trying to provoke the best answers out of you.
And I think I'm doing a pretty good job so far.
I didn't think I didn't think you were being a jerk at all.
All right.
Well, I did.
So I wanted to get that out there.
Well, and for people just tuning in, you should know it's a daybreak by David Swanson.
That's the name of the book.
And that's who I'm interviewing here.
And it's really a great one.
And I guess part of what I was getting at with the federalism thing there is.
And I totally agree with you that for the most part, it's kind of pick and choose and dishonest.
But the right wing.
Well, certainly when they're out of power, they pretty much unanimously will agree and give lip service to the 10th Amendment.
But it seems like it's a very politically incorrect thing, probably still because of the legacy of the white supremacists of the South from a couple of generations back there, where the idea of having that kind of real strong federalism as opposed to a centralized government is still very kind of sinful.
And they call it the Tenthers, right?
It's like they're the birthers who think Obama was is a secret agent of the Kenyan intelligence services or something.
If you believe in the 10th Amendment, then you're a Tenther.
And that's the fringe.
That's what they say over there.
Buzz flash, things like that.
And I just wonder, like, if you know, if we focus on, for example, the medical pot issue or, you know, the people who are demanding at least strong federalism, if not outright independence in Vermont, something like that.
Can we show that trying to limit the power of the federal governments over the states is not always just an excuse to try to keep slaves?
Well, of course it's not.
And sometimes it's in favor of a position I support and sometimes it's against, which is why it's difficult, because my top priority is not expanding or reducing the power of the federal government.
It's achieving peace and justice and human good.
And, you know, so when I see when I see the states doing a horrendous job across the board on an issue such as verifiable elections, and I think, God, if we had a national right to vote and national standards and people were simply registered to vote the same day, they're registered to go kill and die in the military.
And we had national standards that were decent, that we had paper ballots publicly counted before all witnesses in the polling place and tallied up from there so that we knew we were electing who we were electing.
I would love to see that national standard imposed on all the states.
But if we saw a bunch of states doing good verifiable elections and automatic registration of voters and so forth and so on, and the federal government was proposing to come in and screw that up and have one nationalized, computerized voting system with trade secrets for the for the computer company with its CEO advocating for fascist officials and so forth, then I would say, God, let's leave this power to the states.
And so it's sort of it is almost necessarily from issue to issue.
Well, yeah, although I think that I mean, you can even tell in the way that you set that up, I think, which is more likely to be true and the danger, at least you recognize the danger.
And if you have two thirds of the states have terrible elections, that's still just from a checks and balances point of view, better than having one terrible standard.
And of course, if we did have one standard, it wouldn't be yours, David.
It would be the Diebold standard.
It would be the one that you were opposed to.
The same thing is, if you want health care to be your way, what we end up getting is a national law that says we ought to buy health insurance from whoever's most politically connected in D.C.
That kind of thing.
They never do it our way.
They always just use our way as the excuse to then do it their way.
Well, that's certainly not true in any absolute sense, including the example you gave of segregation.
It was the national standard of civil rights and integration being imposed on states.
And in many cases, you have seen the federal government advance human rights and decency and the good of the people nationally over the objections of some states.
But as I've mentioned earlier, the federal government has drifted so far out of the control of the people, has become bought and purchased by corporate interests and the dominance of two parties and a military industrial corporate congressional complex, that it's becoming less and less plausible that we get decent policies out of Washington, which is why I expect to see more and more people across the political spectrum looking to states and localities.
But I don't think it's an absolute rule and that you can state that the federal government, you know, as a matter of physics, can do no good.
We we almost have to make it do good or we're done for it.
We cannot at the state level save it, save the environment.
We cannot at the state level stop these wars.
So at some point, at the state level, we can't wage these wars.
I agree with that, too.
And if we you know, I almost feel like I feel what you're saying.
And it's OK that we don't you know, that we don't have to agree on every little thing and all that.
But I mean, it really does seem like, doesn't it, that the civil rights example is the one big exception to the rule.
That's always the example.
In fact, on virtually everything, our national government.
Well, the warfare state obviously is the most violent force on the face of the earth and has been, you know, since the 40s and, you know, holds thousands of hydrogen bombs in reserve and things like this.
And they're the ones who perpetrate and and through their inflation pay for things like the federal drug war, which if it was just the states and not the federal government, the states would have given up on the drug war for the expense a long time ago.
You know, in fact, almost every example is how the federal government is worse, don't you think?
I mean, isn't isn't making sure that black folks can vote in the South like that and things like that?
That's like the one big exception is those civil rights acts.
Oh, it is the biggest exception and the biggest example, but it's a broad one and it's not one that's in the past.
It's it's ongoing in states and I don't want I'm not trying to minimize its importance either.
And I did.
I didn't think you were for a minute.
But even looking at the military, you know, it's very interesting to me going on this book tour to different cities around the country and time and again hearing that the top issue for these peace and justice groups I'm speaking with is the extent to which their local city or state is putting money into weapons manufacturing, you know, which you think of as a national issue.
But you've got these weapons companies who want free land and tax breaks and protection for their pollution of the local rivers and so forth from city governments that are taking money.
That's meant for housing and infrastructure in that city and giving it to a weapons company that's sending its workers home with cancer that's poisoning the water and it's making weapons for use by the national government in a project that everybody thinks as thinks of as one of the evils of the federal government.
And largely, of course, it is.
But many people are unaware, as I was unaware until recently, that that local and state governments are funding our leading industry.
The one thing we do well, the manufacture of of instruments of death.
Well, and there's a place where libertarians and liberals and conservatives ought to be able to find wide ground for agreement and the violation of people's property rights with any sort of direct subsidies, tax abatements, eminent domain seizures of property on behalf of any company against whoever was there first.
I mean, that's just crime.
The fact that government does it doesn't mean they steal a guy's dairy queen to put a Home Depot there.
That's just as well.
It's not quite as evil as making bombs there, but it's the very same thing.
And I totally agree with you.
And I think that every single libertarian agrees with you and a good many conservatives as well.
That's something that is really and I think probably a hot button issue for people to for just regular people to have their land stolen, have their local government subsidizing people to build their especially weapons companies on stolen land.
I mean, that's just absolutely terrible.
And I think everybody but the judges agree.
Yes.
And sometimes the judges agree, too.
So we do have to unite and fight on those, even if some of us want the money to go away altogether and some of us want the money to go to housing and jobs and green energy and useful things and then cleaning up the disasters that these weapons factories are leaving behind.
You know, if we can agree on the first step to stop what's being done, then we have to use that agreement and enforce it on our so-called representatives.
Right on.
Well, and see, that's where I want to go now.
I'm not very up on electoral politics and I really try to stay out of it because I think it's just poisonous.
I can see the poison that the lure of power spreads all around me.
But I also understand that I'm not going to have it my way and abolish the state tomorrow either.
So and I know that you've done a lot of research and study on this and you have a lot of great things to say about how people can participate in electoral politics to good ends, to at least try to stop some of the madness anyway, electoral reform, voting reform, you know, the different centers of power and how it ought to be done.
I'd like to give you free reign to describe what you would see as sort of your ultimate election reform package for America here, David.
Well, I would drop the idea that most people have that elections alone make any difference.
I certainly, you know, have nothing but contempt for the for this predictable cycle of expectation and disappointment of the past 11 months in which people have behaved as if we had a coup rather than an election, just because we had been in the habit of having coups and refrained from saying, you know, telling the government how to represent us, which is not disrespectful, you know, it's not to offend our friends.
And elected officials should not be your friends or your enemies.
They should be elected officials.
And you shouldn't care what's in their heart of hearts.
You should care what they're doing.
These are life and death matters.
And you should punish them when they do wrong and reward them when they do right on a variety of issues, one in the same person.
But the idea that just electing people alone without beginning our work as citizens the day after the election is going to change anything is crazy.
Never has never will.
If it did, elections would be banned.
But but you couldn't do it without elections, you know.
And we've gotten to the point where people imagine that elections are one more force of corruption and propose things like term limits, let's term limit them so they don't have to be scared about whether we'll vote for them next time and they can just do good as the angels that they are, you know, which which is crazy.
I mean, our elections are corrupted by money, by media, by rules, by by the party dominance, and we have to clean them up in all of those ways.
But but getting rid of them and imagining that public opinion is one more corrupting force than applauding when the White House says, well, we're going to escalate in Afghanistan if we think that's the right thing to do and we're going to ignore public opinion polls and everybody applauding and say, oh, thank you for ignoring us.
That's anti-democratic in a disastrous way.
So we have to use the threat of elections and we have to get to the point where it's a real threat, where we really have the power to unelect people.
But but to do without them, at least in anything remotely resembling the current structure of our society would be a disaster.
So we have to expand the right to vote.
We have to have automatic registration.
We have to not force people to stand in line for eight hours to vote just because they live in a black neighborhood.
We have to clean the process up.
And a lot of that means getting the money out and giving free media on our airwaves to campaigns in a fair way, taking away that biggest expense and publicly funding the rest of the expenses.
So it's not a question of who has or takes the most money, which it almost universally is now.
So there's a lot of work to be done.
All right, now I know you're also the creator of Prosecute Bush Cheney dot org and I just like to give you a chance to address why you think that that's important.
I mean, after all, they're gone and I look backwards.
They're gone, but they're not behind bars.
And many of their crimes are not just theoretically something that might be repeated, but they are ongoing at the moment.
And so it's not so surprising or inexplicable that Obama's Justice Department and it is his the Justice Department works for the president, not the law.
Now, quite openly, he's going to such extraordinary lengths to protect Bush and Cheney and their crimes and appealing and reappealing and threatening to cut off intelligence sharing with Britain and declaring phone companies to be part of the executive branch of the government and so forth to to hide any evidence of torture and warrantless spying.
And, you know, it's not so odd that that would be going on when the warrantless spying programs are continuing.
The president continues to claim the right to torture openly, says we will still rendition.
People is imprisoning people with no charge.
Very openly is continuing illegal wars.
Sounds like you need to make prosecute Obama.
Biden dot org.
Well, I'm not against it.
They're committing the same crimes.
It's much more difficult, of course, to get a president to prosecute himself than to get him to prosecute his predecessor.
But that is proving incredibly difficult as well for the obvious reason that a president wouldn't want his immediate predecessor being prosecuted for crimes, in particular crimes that he's continuing.
And so the encouraging part of this is that there are civil suits making progress and some of these people may be held accountable for crimes they've not been indicted for.
There are foreign prosecutions succeeding.
Twenty three Americans convicted in Italy recently for kidnapping and renditioning.
There are strategies for state and local prosecutions.
And there is always the possibility of us compelling Congress to get off its collective rear end and enforce some accountability and force the Justice Department as well to enforce some justice.
And, you know, when Alberto Gonzalez was forced to resign and leave, it was because one Congress member put in a one sentence bill that said the House Judiciary Committee shall consider whether Gonzalez committed impeachable offenses and co-sponsors were signing on and signing on and signing on and he quit and left.
Why we can't put in that same one sentence bill with Jay Bybee's name in it and create the threat of a real impeachment hearing, which is a privileged hearing, which can bring out any evidence, any photos, videos, reports, why we can't restore the power of subpoena, which we've now lost in the Congress and subpoena someone like Jay Bybee and enforce it with the Congress's police force, not the Justice Department, if we can't do those things, if we can't restore those checking powers of impeachment and subpoena, then Congress ceases to exist as something that the other branches have to worry about at all.
And that means any representation we might dream of creating for ourselves through the House of Representatives is meaningless.
You know what's funny to me?
I remember I it's just associated with the time and place in my head, like standing in the library at my elementary school when I was in, I believe, fourth grade and learning a bit from the librarian about what it means to be a senator, what are the rules, right?
You have to be thirty five to be the president and you have to have lived here for the last 14 years and these and that kind of thing.
And what's the responsibility of the senator?
Well, he's the guy that makes the law up there.
And I remember just as a little kid thinking that anybody with that job, wow, they must take it really seriously and they must know that their every move is writing the history of mankind and that, you know, what a terrible, awesome weight of, you know, I was a little bitty kid.
And I think I understood what the role of a senator was more than any senator in the entire Senate, that, you know, where these people are literally willing to kill people so they can stay in power for their own selfish interests.
And it doesn't occur to them one time.
Wow, I'm destroying America forever.
What the hell am I doing here?
Passing this law.
Why am I killing these people?
Why am I waging this war?
They don't even care, do they?
No, I think it was Senator Mike Gravel, former senator from Alaska who read the Pentagon Papers into the record and so forth, who said I think it was him who said, you know, when I first got to the Senate, I was just I was just sort of awestruck and couldn't imagine what I was doing here among these senators who were going to run this nation and within a month or two, I was wondering how the rest of these bums got here, you know, because it's incredibly depressing to look at who these people are and what they what they do and the lack of a sense of decency that they ought to have.
And part of that is the type of person who would go through the sort of system of elections that we have to put people in there.
You have to be completely willing to sell your soul, expose anything private to you or your friends or loved ones may ever have wanted to keep private and and have an incredible thirst for power for its own sake to get yourself into the Senate or certainly the White House and in some degree the House as well.
But, you know, we do still teach children in school and at and at tourist sites that Congress makes the laws.
And we do still teach people that America is the greatest democracy with the greatest freedom and you have the right to a speedy jury trial and so forth.
And it's all a bunch of lies.
And I don't know when we're going to rewrite the textbooks, whether we are or or exactly how we should do it, to include what the Constitution says and what we actually do, how things might work and how they do work.
It's it's a little bit complex, but we barely teach any of it at all.
And what we do teach people no longer bears much relationship to reality.
You know, one hopeful sign when you talked about how Congress is just they've just abandoned their role, basically, and they're helpless.
And, you know, sorry for bringing them up twice in one show.
But Ron Paul was complaining about, you know, we meaning the Congress, which he's a member of, we have no right as it stands now to ask the Federal Reserve how much money have you created with your magic wand or your police power gun maybe is more like it.
And who did you give it to?
And so they actually passed out of committee over the objection of the chair of the Banking Committee, Barney Frank.
They've passed what's called the Paul Grayson Amendment.
And it's his alliance with I think it's Alan Grayson, right?
The Democrat.
Yes.
And they have this bill to audit the Fed.
And it's already got more than half the Congress or the co-sponsors on this.
And you know what it is.
We both know what it is.
You already said it earlier.
It's just like the same thing with Alberto Gonzalez is because of the public pressure behind it, where these Congress people feel like they have no choice, like they'll never see the light, but you can make them feel the heat.
People have been bombarding the Congress with the audit, the Fed thing.
And I'm sure they have no idea where it's coming from.
And and they have I think Ron Paul has all and Grayson have all of the Republicans and a great many Democrats.
I'm not sure of the numbers signed on as co-sponsor of this thing.
It's only the speaker of the House who's keeping it from passing the House of Representatives right now.
And the good version, not the not the Mel Watt version, the real one.
Yes, yes, I know.
Mel Watt wanted to kill it.
This is a bill that has over 300 well over 300 co-sponsors.
You only need 218 to have a majority to pass it.
Typically, you never get more than 20, 30, 50 co-sponsors on a bill.
You get the 218 in the vote.
Here we're looking at over 300 co-sponsors before even getting to a vote.
They have passed it out of the Finance Committee.
They've also passed another amendment which would facilitate the busting up of these monopolies, so-called banks wouldn't wouldn't make it happen, but would make it more possible.
And, you know, these are baby steps.
This is not Congress controlling our money, as the Constitution requires.
This is just letting Congress have a peek at what's happening with our money.
And I think it's because it's such an outrageous baby step in the same direction that it's been hard for Congress members to to say no.
And there's been the public pressure there saying, why won't you sign this?
Now, often Congress members will sign something with the intention of voting no if it ever comes to a vote or will sign on to co-sponsor and hope that it never does come to a vote.
And many of them know that that Nancy Pelosi doesn't want it to come to a vote.
But yet it may it may.
And if there's enough public pressure, Congress members may stick with their support in large enough numbers to actually pass it, then it goes to the Senate where all good things die.
And it will take a hell of a fight to pass it there and then to get the president to sign it and then to enforce it, it will take eternal vigilance because, you know, we we we pass laws now and then decline to enforce them, we pass laws and have them signing statements in a way so this will be an endless, endless fight.
But progress is being made and it's surprising some people and it's uniting people across the political spectrum.
So I think that's a wonderful thing.
All right, everybody, that's David Swanson.
He's the co-founder of the After Downing Street Coalition.
And thanks, by the way, for doing so much to publicize that Downing Street memo.
I thought it was the most important thing.
Wrote an article about it as soon as I saw it.
I appreciate that.
It was a wonderful effort by tens of thousands of Americans that I would love to see repeated, maybe when the Supreme Court gives this ruling on corporate free speech rights, we'll see a similar burst of outrage.
Yeah, that could be one.
Or maybe when they put 40,000 more troops in AFPAC.
Yes, yes, indeed.
Or even better before they do it.
Yeah.
All right, everybody.
David Swanson.
The book is Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.
Thanks very much for your time today.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
