07/02/10 – Eric Garris – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, everybody, welcome to the show, wrapping up the week here.
Anti-war radio on LRN, the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM, and simulcast in the first two hours of the show, every Tuesday through Friday from nine to 11.
Uh, well, West Coast time where I am 11 to one, Texas time at chaos radio, austin.org.
And our first guest on the show today is anti-war.com's founder and managing director, Eric Gares.
He's also the, um, webmaster for lewrockwell.com.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Um, let's talk about this vote.
This is the strangest thing in the world.
Uh, I wanted you on the show to see if you could explain this to me a little bit, cause you're such a master at the electoral politics game here.
And, uh, we got three of the four top stories on anti-war.com right now are, uh, the roll call votes on one, the war funding bill to withdraw from Afghanistan and three cut all war funding.
And I've never seen so many Republicans vote against either of these, uh, kind of anti-war bills, uh, anything like this before, I'm not sure what's going on.
I was wondering if you could help provide some clarity.
Well, I talked this morning with a congressional staffer who said that this was the most convoluted, uh, set of votes that he's ever seen, which is saying quite a bit, considering we're talking about Congress, um, as convoluted as the Afghan war and its goals have become the, the votes last night really reflected the, uh, confusion and, uh, just how complex this, uh, the war funding has become, there were actually six votes last night.
And interestingly enough, that Ron Paul speech that you just aired came after the last vote.
They did not want to give him his full five minutes during any of the other votes.
I can't figure out why the final vote was the vote to approve the war funding bill.
It was presented as a procedural bill or a procedural amendment on a bill that was described as such making emergency supplemental appropriations for disaster release and summer jobs for fiscal year ending September 30th, 2010.
Summer jobs.
Is that what they're calling it now?
That's what they called it.
Summer jobs, summer jobs in Afghanistan.
Yeah, that's hilarious.
So, um, so that the, the vote that came, that eventually was the approval vote passed 215 to 210 with every Republican voting against it.
Now, how's that?
Because it said summer jobs because it added all this, uh, domestic pork into the, into the legislation.
So what's going to happen now is that it goes back to the Senate.
If the Senate concurs on everything the house did, it goes to the president for signature.
Otherwise it will come back to the house for reconciliation and may result in another vote in the house, uh, at some point in the near future.
But that is not clear.
The other votes are very interesting.
It basically was set up to allow members of Congress to go back to their districts and say, I voted for the war or I voted against the war.
Uh, because given the different sets of votes, they could claim either one, which is why such disparity between the cut off funding bill and the withdrawal from Afghanistan bill there.
That's right.
Now there were two.
Now, hold it right there, man.
We got the, okay.
So the bumper music.
Yeah, we got the bumper music playing here.
We got to go out to break.
Um, but I'd like to note here, uh, Eric, before we go out to break real quick that, uh, this is all about emergency supplementals that Obama promised.
He would never fund the war by emergency supplemental.
Just that one more at the beginning of last year.
And now here we are.
All right.
We'll be back.
What's up next.
Visit the Liberty radio network program guide to find out at shows.lrn.fm that shows.lrn.fm all right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and I know you read Raimondo three times a week, but this is the guy that really makes it happen.
Eric Garris, the founder and the director of antiwar.com.
Now, Eric, we're talking about the six different votes in the house of representatives on war funding yesterday.
Help me make sense out of this.
I'll try the original bill that was passed by the Senate.
Includes 37 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq, but also includes money for FEMA, Haiti, veterans, the Gulf oil spill, farm loans, mine safety, Guam, highway safety, Capitol Police, and a few other things.
And this is the Senate bill.
That is correct.
OK, so the first amendment was an amendment to add more domestic pork like summer jobs and such, and that passed.
The second amendment was additional domestic issues, money for teachers, Pell Grants, energy loans, schools on military installations.
But interestingly, also includes tightening up of Iran sanctions and tightening up of the no-fly list.
Those were just thrown in there, as well as requirements to shore up the policing of detainees.
So that also passed.
Those are the two reasons that the Republicans voted against the final bill, 215 to 10.
Now, the three interesting amendments that came up were all defeated.
One would have required a new national intelligence estimate on Afghanistan by January 31st of next year, requiring a plan by April 4th of next year on the safe, orderly, and expeditious redeployment of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
That got 160 yes votes.
That's as close as we came to any sort of anti-war vote.
The Barbara Lee amendment, which would require war funds to be tied to withdrawal of Afghanistan, got 100 votes.
The best amendment was an amendment to cut off all war funds from Afghanistan immediately.
That bill got, that amendment got only 25 yes votes.
There were the three Republicans and 22 Democrats.
The three Republicans were Ron Paul, Duncan from Tennessee, and Walter Jones, right?
No, not Walter Jones.
Interestingly enough, it was from Tim Johnson of Illinois.
Well, tell me, Jones was out that day or something.
He voted yes?
Yes.
Yes, again, this was one of those things where people, see, Jones was the co-sponsor of one of the weaker amendments, so I think he felt obligated to vote against this one, as did Barbara Lee.
Barbara Lee voted against the immediate cutoff of war funding.
Yeah.
Well, I know that Walter Jones is sincere in his opposition to the war, so I'm not exactly sure what's going on there, but I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
He was the co-sponsor of the McGovern-Obey Amendment, which was the one to require the National Intelligence Estimate.
So I think that he probably made a deal to not support the more radical ones in order to push this one.
Okay, fair enough.
Go ahead.
But, you know, this was just, these last three amendments, none of them were expected to pass.
They were allowed up in order, as I said, to give Congress members the argument that they voted either for the war or against the war when they go back out to visit their constituents and when they're running for re-election.
There were very few that voted consistently across the board.
One of them, interestingly enough, was Alan Grayson.
He voted against the final funding, voting with the Republicans, and he voted for the immediate cutoff, and he voted for all the anti-war bills.
He and Ron Paul were among two of the only people that voted that way.
How'd Dennis Kucinich do in there?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Kucinich also voted correctly on all of those.
Yeah, I would assume so.
He's voted against war funding all along, just like Ron Paul, right?
That's right.
Kucinich has got one of the best voting records in Congress as far as war bills go.
All right.
Well, so the lesson here basically is that we have our very small group of congressmen who we know mean it, and the rest of them are just posturing, and they get to vote yes, no, and sideways on six different bills so that when they go home and run for re-election, they can put their finger in the wind, figure out what it is that people want, and then they can claim that that's how they've been voting.
Right.
And this is, I mean, it's really a reflection of the whole, quote-unquote, strategy of our mission in Afghanistan.
You know, as Ron Paul said in his speech that you opened up with, what is the reason that we're there?
It keeps changing all the time.
And so you have mission creep being reflected in the votes in the House.
Yeah.
Well, and of course it's, I don't know, I guess I subscribe to the Gareth Porter theory that basically the generals are just chasing the bullets they've just shot in whichever direction they're shooting, just keep going that way and just keep it going on forever.
You know, of course the highest levels of the Pentagon are intimately tied together with the military industrial complex firms and so forth with the iron triangle revolving door thing.
And you know, I don't know.
Let me ask you, do you think that, you know, anybody still imagines that they're going to have some kind of safe, secure pipeline from Tajikistan down to the port of Karachi there?
It seems like that pipe dreams long gone, right?
Well, pipeline dream.
You know, I think that those kinds of things, you know, the, the, the, so the mineral wealth in Afghanistan, those are just PR.
They're just trying to sell the American people on the fact that they might at some point recoup some of the losses of the money.
They wanted an oil pipeline through there before the war.
Well, yes, they may have wanted it, but in terms of holding it out, if something that, that we think we're going to get anything from, as long as we're there militarily, those kinds of things are not going to happen.
And that, you know, you look at what happened in Iraq.
I mean, look at all the oil money that we made back for the money we spent on the war that Wolfowitz predicted.
Yeah, it didn't, it didn't materialize.
Well, and I think it's in the times today that it's the Chinese who are going in there with briefcases.
Yeah.
And they're over there making deals for that Iraqi oil.
And people want to say, Petraeus won that war.
It sure don't look like it to me.
Well, in, in, in a number of ways, we're fighting the wars for the Chinese.
I mean, they're, they're the ones that are profiting from our, uh, from our actions around the world.
Well, and fair enough.
They're the ones paying for it all.
Well, that's right.
So it's a good deal.
The American empire.
It's a wondrous thing.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Eric.
Uh, I've learned, uh, again, how cynical the leaders of Congress are.
Appreciate it.
Okay.
All right, everybody.
That's Eric Garris.
He's the founder and managing director of antiwar.com.
He's also the webmaster for lewrockwell.com.
Give him credit.
Anti, we'll be back.