Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Jim Bovard.
And, oh no, that means I've got to think of all the books he wrote off the top of my head here.
Let me see.
I should have prepared a little bit for this.
Let's see.
The Fair Trade Fraud and the Farm Fiasco, Freedom in Chains, Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and about six or ten others.
I don't know.
Welcome back, Jim.
How the hell are you?
Hey, doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on your show.
Well, you're welcome.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Jim's website is jimbovard.com, and he keeps a great blog there as well.
Please take a look at that and all of his books, and most especially, Attention Deficit Democracy.
In fact, if I remember right, you've got a whole thing on the housing bubble in there, don't you?
I had a thing on the housing bubble and Bush Betrayal.
Bush Betrayal is the one, yeah.
Which came out in August, September 2004.
And so George Bush was running for re-election on his American Dream Down Payment Act, which he was giving people free down payments to buy a home, and it didn't work out so well.
You want to be rich, keep up with Jim Bovard's journalism.
He's ahead of the curve.
Yeah, well, you know, I've promised a lot of things in my writing, but I haven't promised that.
Well, I'll promise it, and then it's all right, because people can't hold me responsible for what you don't do.
Fair enough.
Anyway, one of the things you did do was write 10,000 articles for the Future of Freedom Foundation, and the latest one, I think, is called TSA, Tenth Anniversary of a National Nightmare.
And that's the good thing about 2012, right?
Is that this whole year long is the tenth anniversary of all kinds of horrible things.
I was just telling them about Dick Cheney's VFW speech a minute ago.
One of the things that happened in 2002 was the creation of the Transportation Security Administration.
Hey, there hasn't been a September 11th attack since then, so they must be doing a good job, right, Jim?
Well, I think that's how they justified their budget.
I mean, they've certainly turned into full employment for deviants.
Yeah.
And dumbasses.
There you go.
I mean, if folks want to get paid to get a handful of other Americans, that's the job to have.
Definitely.
Yeah, this one TSA screener girl says to me, Why are you so mad at me?
It's not my fault.
I said, Yeah, of course it's your fault.
You could get a real job, but you choose to do this to people instead, so of course it's personal.
You're wrong.
What you do is wrong.
Wife went through my stuff.
Scott, I hope you didn't make her cry.
Hell, you could have a burrito truck or something and sell burritos to people who are hungry and make a perfectly honest living.
You don't have to be a TSA.
What do you call them?
They're not cops.
They're some kind of subcop.
Well, I mean, they are federal agents.
I mean, that's a huge part of the problem now.
I mean, you have all these federal agents in the airports, and if you say anything to them, there's all these different statutes, which if they say that you said something false, boom, you made a false statement to a federal agent.
That's Title 18, Section 1001.
That's a felony.
Used to be, you know, they had nitwits in the airport that did about as good a job as the TSA, and, you know, if those folks gave you grief, then you give them grief back.
But now it's possible for the TSA to fine you $1,500 for a bad attitude.
So that is one more paradigm.
Well, I hope there's a statute of limitations on that.
You know, there might be.
How long has it been since I've battened out the TSA person?
Not very long.
Well, I'll certainly try to do my share as well, but it's part of the trouble.
This whole attitude fine system is something that the agency pulled out of its ear and just simply issued an edict that said that it's going to start doing that.
Most people don't know that they have this fine system.
Most people don't know that they're at peril for being, you know, fined for $1,000 because they didn't shine the boot to the TSA agent who was squeezing their boobs or balls.
Well, you know, I think I just assumed that whatever my attitude problem was, I was still on the safe side of the line, but actually it doesn't sound like I really was.
No, I mean, well, it's all very arbitrary.
I mean, as typical with the TSA for so many different things, the TSA makes the rules up as it goes along, and if the TSA decides it wants to penalize you, then there's all these different penalty flags it can throw.
But there is, I mean, it's a total travesty of due process aside from the agency itself, and there are so many ways that they've changed the rules as they've gone along.
And basically it's almost as if they think that, you know, grabbing Americans by the back of the neck and, you know, forcing them to submit is the same as making people safe.
But it's been a fascinating litmus test for how the American public has changed just to be standing around in airport TSA lines and shooting the bull with folks and trying to draw people out on what they think.
And I've always been kind of mortified to find so many people kind of like, well, I'm glad they're there because they make me feel safe.
And I'm thinking like, well, okay, you know, I bet you're not a card-carrying ACLU member, are you?
Yeah, well, and, you know, that's the thing, too, is every time there's some ridiculous travesty at the airport where, you know, there's a scandal because of the way they frisk some 92-year-old lady or 2-year-old kid or some kind of horrible thing, they can always find somebody in line to say, well, I'm glad that the totalitarian police state is here, otherwise I'd be afraid.
They always can find somebody.
Yeah, well, and it's sad because, well, you know, I think those kind of folks have always been part of human nature and society.
But I have to wonder if all the fear-mongering in the era after 9-11 has sharply increased the percentage of those in the American public.
Yeah, well, and everybody else's, you know, tolerance for them and willingness to let them dictate how things should be then.
Yeah, and the thing that's a paradox here is that the TSA has proven it's boundless and competent so many times.
And it just, you know, it was a laughingstock in the first six months it was out there, and it's still a laughingstock, and yet people still submit.
Well, now, I want to get to the laughingstock, and we'll have a whole segment to kind of get to, because there's really, you know, some very important avenues to explore there about how this thing operates and how well it doesn't.
But what about how well it does?
Have they caught anybody?
Have they stopped any terrorists?
Is there any kind of demonstrable thing other than, hey, no lions as far as the eye can see, so my anti-lion machine must be working kind of argument?
The TSA has succeeded in writing a lot of fines, and having a lot of people arrested for talking back to them, because, once again, this thing of them being federal agents, it makes it a lot easier for them just to push the button next to you and know you're in handcuffs.
But they haven't actually protected the flying public at all?
I'm not aware of any cases in which they have stopped a terrorist attack in progress, or a terrorist attack that would have happened.
Right.
I mean, you have a case where, like, Cat Williams, the comedian, accidentally packed his gun, but it was whatever.
It was going to be in his suitcase anyway.
He wasn't hijacking a plane.
He's a comedian.
Right.
Well, I mean, there's heaps of cases like that.
I mean, just hundreds if not thousands of cases like that.
And TSA is a typical federal agency.
It's starved for headlines, so it often puts out these absurd claims about the terrible problem that it saved Americans from the attack, but it almost always has turned out to be this utter bull.
I'm just surprised that anybody still gives that agency any credibility, because it's done so many things to debunk itself.
Well, you know, last week there was the thing about the little girl that...
I forgot what they did to her.
Something stupid.
Oh, they pulled the little girl off the plane because she was on the no-fly list, right?
And then, I guess it was the next day...
And, oh, because that was my whole rant was, oh, well, hey, the computer says so there's just no adult discretion in play here whatsoever.
We're going to drag the little girl off the plane.
Her parents apparently aren't terrorists, but the little girl is, yeah.
But then the next day, or maybe it was the other way around, there was pieces of a gun stashed inside a stuffed animal.
And without having all the details, apparently what had happened was the ex-wife had tried to set the guy up and put pieces of the gun in the kid's doll.
Well, the cops let reason prevail, and apparently they bought the guy's explanation that, oh, I get it, domestic dispute, she was trying to get him in trouble, go ahead.
They actually used their discretion to let him go ahead.
All right, score one for freedom and reason and rationality.
And there's the quotes of the Americans in line going, I don't care, they still shouldn't have let him fly.
Even after taking the gun and understanding that he really didn't do it, nope, they still shouldn't have let him fly.
That's what the American people thought.
All right, I'm sorry.
Anyway, we'll be right back with Jim Bovard after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with my friend Jim Bovard.
Jimbovard.com is his website.
Of course, he wrote, I don't know, dozens.
Well, more than a dozen books, anyway.
The best ones.
He wrote the 12 best books that have ever been written.
Well, I haven't had that many books published yet, but I appreciate the thought.
Well, it was 11 or something.
Anyway, also he writes for Jacob Hornberger and the crew over at the Future of Freedom Foundation, FFF.org.
This one's called TSA 10th Anniversary of a National Nightmare.
And this kind of goes to what you were saying about the people in line there and what we've become.
I don't know.
I don't think Americans were like this before.
I mean, maybe they were kind of like this, but they weren't this bad.
But everything really did change on September 11th, and you really do have millions, tens, and hundreds of millions of Americans perfectly happy to stand there looking straight down at their socks, silently shuffling through, you know, like it's a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank or something to get on an airplane.
They think it's the right thing.
It doesn't even bother them anymore, if it ever did.
There was a motto of the TSA's air marshals early on, three words, Dominate, Intimidate, Control.
And that is the attitude the TSA has taken towards all of Americans who are traveling someplace.
And it is as if the simple fact that someone buys an airline ticket automatically gives the TSA unlimited power over them.
And that's how the TSA claims it has a right to take their picture naked and save it in the files and don't BS me that it's not being saved.
You know, at some point we're going to find out there's going to be scandals about these photos that are going to be very entertaining at one level, but we have no idea what use the government is making of that data.
And the government has a permanent history of misusing data.
Tell it to J. Edgar Hoover if you want to trust the government.
But going back to the fundamental problem after 9-11, you know, the polls after 9-11 showed that the percentage of Americans who trusted the government to do the right thing doubled in the first three weeks after 9-11.
That was how the government got all this extra power.
That's how they were able to do its executive orders, suspending habeas corpus, the torture regime, the wiretapping, the TSA.
And unfortunately, a lot of Americans still haven't recognized it.
The government becomes far more untrustworthy the more power it grabs.
Yeah.
Jeez, the worst thing ever just happened on their watch.
What a success.
I better, you know, defer the rest of my decisions to them, you know?
Yeah, and it's just, I mean, it was such a disconnect, and it was helped along greatly by the mainstream media.
I mean, there was this, you know, it was like there was an iron curtain that fell over being able to criticize the government in so many different places.
Government was sacrosanct, and it was from that being sacrosanct that they could seize so much more power and rub Americans' nose in the dirt, which is what they've done, which is what TSA does on a daily basis.
Yeah, and then, you know, they used the 9-11 commission to just simply create the pressure from below to push, to turn the Office of Homeland Security into the Department of Homeland Security.
They even said at the beginning, this is an outcome-based commission.
We're not really looking for who was responsible for this happening on their watch when they're supposed to be the cops who protect America from this kind of thing.
We're more interested in the recommendation that we need a new national police force, so hurry up and write your recommendations, please.
Like, that was, I think, Bush's speech on the day that they inaugurated the damn thing.
Well, yeah, and the 9-11 commission was misnamed.
It should have been called the Stephan Thatcher Commission.
And it wasn't a coincidence that the report came out in mid-July 2004 during Bush's re-election campaign, and basically whitewashed the government in a lot of different ways.
And later on, a number of the people in that panel admitted that the government had withheld information, but these folks were so desperate to be Washington players that they went ahead and rubber-stamped the report, and basically stood there and listened to all the accolades.
But they double-crossed the American people, because they did not tell us until years later that the information had been withheld from them.
Yeah, well, I mean, it was obvious enough.
I never even read that thing, because I just figured what would be the point of that?
Like Ron Paul, I remember, was asked on TV in 2002, maybe early 2003.
Oh, I know what it was.
Yeah, it was 2002, right when he was voting no on the Iraq thing.
Bill Moyers asked him, well, do you go to the secret intelligence briefings and stuff?
And he says, oh, no, I don't want to be confused by their propaganda.
And that's my thing, too.
I'll just stick to private sector journalists doing their best and see what I can make of that.
Well, and there's a second problem with Ron Paul going to those secret briefings, is people that go there are bound by a pledge of confidentiality.
So people hear all this BS, but then they aren't allowed to say so in public.
And so a congressman could actually have a lot less freedom of speech if he goes to those confidential briefings where they fed all kinds of wacko fear stories prior to 9-11.
On the other hand, though, they're privileged from arrest except for a breach of the peace, right?
Well, right.
Well, the thing I said was prior to 9-11.
The thing I meant was prior to the attack on Iraq in March 2000.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sorry.
But still, though, I mean, if you get a secret briefing and they tell you a bunch of nonsense and you're a congressman and you go on TV and say, check out all this nonsense they try to tell me that ain't true, then what can happen?
You go to prison for that?
Oh, sure.
I mean, you know, I think they would find some kind of loophole as far as doing your duties.
I mean, just get you on a phone raising technicality or something, right?
Something like that.
I mean, it's interesting going back to the 1972 or three when that Senator Gravel, I mispronounce it, was the only guy in the Senate who had the courage to take the Pentagon papers that Ellsberg leaked to him and stand on the floor of the Senate and read them into the record because he knew that if he's reading them on the floor of the Senate that he'd be safe that way.
But any other way that he passed on that information, he might have been prosecuted.
Right.
Yeah, what a travesty.
And, you know, it is amazing, too, they could just take their failure and turn it into such a success like that.
Not only do they get to have a bonus war, they get to create not just the TSA but an entire new homeland.
I mean, this is really the National Police Force, right?
With all the fusion, with all the state and local police, that's what Homeland Security is.
It's the National Police Force our granddads would have never let them have, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's J. Edgar Hoover on steroids and amphetamines.
And it's unfortunate Congress is doing almost no effective oversight.
Well, and it seems like, you know, I don't know if it would have to be as big as September 11th, but another successful, pretty big terrorist attack or two.
And it seems like these guys are poised, maybe this is even the plan, would be to just go ahead and fold the state police agencies into the Homeland Security Department.
You think?
Don't think so, no.
No?
No, but I've been wrong before.
That's the worst nightmare, I guess, for me, is just to go ahead and nationalize all cops.
Well, I don't think that they'd do that because there'd be so many conflicts between the different groups.
Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah, just be too unworkable from their own point of view.
Right, right.
Well, at least there's that.
There's hope, there's hope.
Yeah, hey, liberty's safe after all, because the only people threatening it are these boobs running the U.S. government who can't do a damn thing right.
Thank goodness.
All right, well, thanks, Jim.
It was great talking to you again.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
That's the great Jim Bovard, everybody.jimbovard.com, fff.org.
