All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and on the line is David Swanson from warisacrime.org.
It used to be after Downing Street in regards to the Downing Street memos proving that Bush and Blair knew that they were lying us into war.
And he's also the author of the book Daybreak about returning to the U.S.
Constitution, and also War is a Lie, about all the lies they used through history to get us into these horrible wars.
Welcome back to the show, David, good to have you here.
Hey Scott, good to be here.
All right, so tell me all about this military industrial complex at 50, a national conference in Charlottesville, Virginia.
I take it it's a national conference in Charlottesville, Virginia.
That's the idea, and you know what the military industrial complex is, as well as anybody, but we think that, you know, this 50 years since Eisenhower uttered that phrase should not go without comment, and that there's a as desperate a need as ever to confront the power, the ever-growing power of the military industrial complex in Washington.
I mean, we've just seen them pass the biggest military bill ever without debate in the midst of this hysterical debate over spending.
I mean, you couldn't have a starker contrast between the power of the military to get any money it wants and the power of those who want to cut spending to cut everything else in sight, and so we're bringing 20-some speakers, experts in various areas of the military industrial complex from around the country to Charlottesville, September 16th to 18th.
You can go to mic50.org and find out about it, register, learn more, but you will be bringing people that libertarians might have heard of, like Karen Kwiatkowski, who's running for Congress as a libertarian and exposed war lies coming through the Pentagon's intelligence operations there, and Bonnie Greenhouse, who was just awarded almost a million dollars in restitution for having been demoted from her job for having objected to the corruption of the contracts for Halliburton eight years ago, to former military officers, CIA officers, activists, experts, organizers, authors, academics.
It's going to be a great conference.
All right, well, now I have the email here.
Let me click on additional speakers and agenda.
I don't know if this guy's on your list as of this moment, but he's got to be.
You got to get this guy to come.
It's Chris Hellman from the National Priorities Project.
I just finished interviewing him about his brand new Tom Dispatch piece.
He did the calculation, David.
Almost, almost eight trillion dollars spent on the wars, the Pentagon, the national security and homeland security states in this country since September 11th.
And he admits in that article today that it's at least 11 trillion dollars if you put in the cost of caring for veterans.
He excluded, actually, was any any future costs whatsoever.
Right, right.
And so the calculation that, you know, of of people like Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, that that more than doubles the cost of the wars when applied to his calculation, that includes the base military budget that somehow miraculously doesn't pay for any wars.
Well, then you get over 11 trillion.
And if you add in impact on fuel and the lost opportunity costs and all the rest of it, it's more than that.
So you're talking about a pretty darn big number.
And the doomsday that Panetta is afraid of in Washington from the super Congress of 12, you know, deadlocking or whatever, it is going to amount to a half a trillion over 10 years at best.
You know, 50 trillion per excuse me, billion, 50 billion per year off of a budget of around 700 billion.
I mean, it's just not addressing the problem in a fundamental way.
Chris, Chris Hellman, by the way, and I spoke together at an event up in Massachusetts a while back and talked Congressman Delahunt out of his support for these wars.
At least we think we were we were influential.
It may have helped that the entire crowd was with us.
But he he left he left the stage that day sounding sounding like he was going to come around and he did.
And so I have I have lots of admiration for Chris and for National Priorities Project.
Well, that's great.
And now, I wonder, what do you think it was that really won him over?
Did you really challenge the premise how we got into this thing in the first place?
Or just focus on the costs monetarily?
Or how did this work?
Oh, it was a this was put together by the peace group up there on on Cape Cod.
And, and they had a number of speakers speaking to the morality and the legality and the financial cost and the, you know, all of the different ways in which these wars are disasters.
And, you know, maybe it helped that the guy was was planning to retire or maybe he played he decided to retire because he was losing so much support.
In any event, you know, the entire audience was with us.
He didn't have any good arguments.
Every argument he attempted to put up was immediately and soundly refuted by one or more speakers on the stage.
It was, it was a very one sided debate.
And, and he disappointed everyone by refusing to, to firmly commit to turning against these wars.
But shortly thereafter, he announced that he would.
And so we, you know, it's always a question as well of whether someone's vote matters.
And when when you can vote against the war, knowing full well that the that the war spending is going to pass with the votes of others, and that no one is really going to to demand your head for it.
That can't hurt as well.
Right?
Yeah, well, I guess we'll see how well he holds to it.
And if it ever does come down to a matter of his vote counting, but you say this is last term anyway?
Yes, yes, indeed.
And so somebody, somebody leaving, you know, sometimes in our completely perverse democratic system, finds it easier to listen to his or her constituents than somebody who's trying to stick around, you know, how twisted that is.
But But the fact is that these Congress members are for the most part, much more heavily influenced by the military industrial complex, not just its hold on the media, but it's it's hold on their pocketbooks.
And you look at a AP article from yesterday about the 12 people to which Congress has now been reduced as a super Congress of 12.
And they all have huge weapons plants in their states or districts.
And that's put forth as an argument for why they won't allow serious cuts to the military.
And so we think it's time that we get organized in a serious way, which this conference is attempting to put conversion back on the agenda where it hasn't been for a generation converting from it's so it's such a shame, David, that the it all comes down to the such short term interests as a certain weapons plant or certain base being open in a certain congressional district, multiplied, you know, 434 times over again, or whatever, that determines this policy that that it has that much sway, when, as you said before, and I think this is the most important point of all, we talked about these trillions have been spent on the war, it's the lost opportunity costs, it's all of the other wealth that could have been created with that money as an investment, instead of turning to high explosives, and, you know, laser designators for those high explosives that are useless for any other purpose.
And, and it just seems like the, you don't have the slightest bit of courage in Congress, for from any of these people to just say, Look, it's going to be hard for your town if we close the base.
But you know what, we're losing money on this base, the whole society is suffering, because we're dumping money down this military rat hole, we will all be much more prosperous, your town might have to find something else to do.
But we've got to make this shift.
It has to happen.
None of them have the courage to say that it all comes down to 15 jobs making a little widget for a part and another part for a Lockheed jet.
Well, and I don't know if you would go the next step with me on in terms of the solution I envisioned, but I would move that investment to useful nonviolent industries, I would put that money into education into infrastructure into green energy into all sorts of areas where it doesn't have these disastrous side effects on on life and the limb and on the environment and on foreign relations and our economy and, and, and where the dollars for each dollar invested have a much better impact on jobs and better paying jobs.
I think we desperately, you know, you see Paul Krugman going on TV saying, if only we could, we could stage an alien invasion, and then we'd invest in the military preparedness to hold off the aliens.
And then we'd announced they weren't really coming from Mars.
And we'd have a great economy.
Well, he's wrong.
You know, if only we could get the enthusiasm to invest in nonviolent industries and not destroy ourselves in the process.
Well, you know, politics is just a continuation of war by other means, to take that old von Clausewitz and turn it back around again, I would rather have all of those things that you just named, from education to healthcare to green energy to everything else be done by people in the price system instead of as government projects.
But then again, I would be totally willing to have a great time arguing with you about what to spend this money on and how it ought to be spent.
When we quit spending it killing people and creating more enemies for our country and driving our country, you know, off the cliff here for this empire basis around the world.
Well, I agree.
And if these, you know, there's always a handful of billionaires, Warren Buffett and gang saying, let's stop the course we're on tax us.
Well, if they instead of saying, please tax us, they would go ahead and fund the things that you would like to see privately funded so that the government didn't have to, I wouldn't complain, you know, if they would stop hoarding these tens of billions of dollars and instead put them into green energy and infrastructure and education, I certainly wouldn't object.
But as long as nobody's ever going to do that through the magic of the private sector, you know, let's take it out of the machinery of death and move it over there.
And let's not you and I pay for it.
Let's have the Warren Buffett so the world pay for it.
All right.
Now, tell us again about this conference.
It's the military industrial complex at 50, a national conference in Charlottesville, Virginia.
How can they find out about it?
How can they attend it?
When is it going to take place?
And all of those great things coming up a little bit after September 11th, September 16th, 17th and 18th.
It's a Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
You can go to M.I.C.
50.org.
So that's like the military industrial complex five zero M.I.C.
50.org.
And if you if you need help with travel or housing, we'll see what we can do.
But you got to go there and register.
OK, now.
So I'm very sorry.
I made an error earlier.
I was just I saw the date September 1st before my eyes here.
That's when the fees increase.
So register soon.
You say it's September 16th.
Yes, indeed.
Thank you very much, David.
I really appreciate your time and all your efforts for peace.
Oh, thanks for your great work.
All right.
But that's the great David Swanson.
War is a crime.
Dot org M.I.C.
50.org.
And of course, the books again are Daybreak and War is a lie.
