04/01/09 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And introducing our guest today, the great Jim Bovard.
He's the author of, well, let's see how many I can do off the top of my head here.
The Fair Trade Fraud and the Farm Fiasco, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and probably about four or five more books than that.
He's also a senior fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How the hell are you?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Hey, you know, it sounds like your accent's changing a little bit since you moved to Southern California.
Oh, yeah, right.
So, are those Valley girls having a bad influence on you or what?
Oh, man, I hope not.
I'm waiting to see you start to use some of that Valley girl lingo in your show.
Oh, man.
Well, you know, if I do, hop on a plane and fly over here and smack me in the head.
Well, you know, I think what I'd do is laugh instead of just cut loose with my laugh.
Yeah, that would probably help with the reset there.
I don't want to start talking like a Californian.
I don't think I ever really had much of a Texas accent in the first place, did I?
No, no.
I was a bit surprised when you said you were from Texas because I always figured you were more like an Arkansas kind of guy.
Oh, thanks a lot.
That's very good, Jim.
All right, well, listen.
As always, I appreciate you putting off getting to the hard liquor until after the interview today.
Well, you know, it's a sacrifice, but for your show, it's worth it.
All right, well, I sure appreciate it.
Okay, now listen.
Here's the thing.
These Democrats hate freedom a lot, don't they?
Well, the ones with the power, anyway.
Well, you know, I don't know if they hate freedom, but they certainly do like power.
Yeah, well, those things are opposites.
That's the problem.
The more of the latter they got, the less of the former for me.
And this is what worries me is this mandatory national service.
Now, I've got to admit, it only worries me a little bit because AmeriCorps and all that to me always seem like such a joke that it's kind of hard to be frightened of.
I don't like the premise behind it, of course, but anyway.
Go ahead.
Tell the people about AmeriCorps as it existed under Clinton, under Bush Jr., and then tell us about what the Obama team is trying to do here.
Well, the Obama team just ran through a bill through Congress called the GIVE Act.
It's going to triple the size of AmeriCorps from 75,000 to a quarter million members.
The GIVE is an acronym that stands for Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act.
I think this is the Capitol Hill version of a circle jerk.
But it's a very pious act, and so therefore it was very popular with the kind of people who love big government.
I've always been puzzled why AmeriCorps is so popular in D.C., but I think a major reason is because it puts a big smiley face on the federal government itself because it makes the government look like this giant engine of good deeds, and it kind of wipes away all the bitter memories of FEMA or the farm subsidy outrages or the public housing projects.
It can even brush aside the news of the latest torture scandal.
Because it's all selflessness and happiness.
It is quite a smokescreen, and I think you're right.
That probably is the thing that they like about it the most.
It's kind of like the mobster giving out turkeys on the corner before Thanksgiving, that kind of thing.
Yeah, and it's also turned into a slush fund for a lot of nonprofits because they get this huge amount of free labor from the federal government which they can use to prop up and expand their operations.
But the thing that fascinates me about AmeriCorps is you look at the actual details of what it does, and yet it still gets respect because, for instance, under the Clinton administration, AmeriCorps members ran a program in Buffalo that gave children $5 for each toy gun that they brought in, as well as a certificate praising their virtue for not playing with toy guns.
In San Diego, AmeriCorps members busied themselves collecting used bras for a homeless shelter.
Down there in Los Angeles, AmeriCorps members were foisting unreliable ultra-low flush toilets on poor people.
That was the Clinton administration.
So it's not quite the Hitler youth.
Well, yeah.
I mean it didn't have quite the same chain to it, but I looked at some of the recent reports and stories, and nowadays what AmeriCorps is doing, up in San Francisco, AmeriCorps members are busying themselves mediating elementary school playground disputes.
It's really hard to imagine how the school could get along without those guys and women in their gray shirts and gray hats just telling kids not to imitate the Three Stooges.
Well, and it seems like if these kids who join up are actually the kind of kids who want to spend free time volunteering, it seems like if they were volunteering within any organization other than the national government, they could probably be put to better use actually helping somebody.
Well, true, but I mean there are so many different levels of fraud with this program, and this whole notion that they're volunteers is the first fraud out of the gate, because the average – they're being paid at an annual rate of around $15,000, which is not that high, but it sure as heck is not volunteering.
Almost 90% of former AmeriCorps members go to work for the government agencies afterwards or for nonprofit groups.
So it's sort of like their time at AmeriCorps is often like a paid internship.
And then they become parasites for life.
Well, they end up doing good deeds for their life at other people's expense.
Yeah.
But looking at some of the other programs that AmeriCorps is up to recently, there was a program in Oswego, New York, where AmeriCorps set up a donation bin to gather used cell phones for victims of domestic violence.
I mean this is the kind of program that America can't get by without.
In Florida, AmeriCorps members in the Women in Distress Program organized a poetry reading on the evils of domestic violence.
Out in Montana, AmeriCorps members carried out a book drive to encourage people to give their books to be sent to Cameroon.
Like that's going to make a big difference.
You know, it probably had more effect making people feel virtuous in Montana than spreading literacy in Africa.
There was a program down outside of Baton Rouge where AmeriCorps members are recycling prom dresses.
They're out there trying to get people, they're partnering with the Junior League down there, trying to get people to give their old prom dresses to donate to high school girls.
Across the country, AmeriCorps does a lot of puppet shows.
Puppet shows?
Puppet shows.
This is something which they have always relished since they were created in 1993.
Out in Springfield, out in the Midwest, AmeriCorps members don puppets to edify three-year-olds at the Little Angels Child Care Center on the benefits of smoke detectors.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, you know, thank God for Uncle Sam.
Well, now, how much money is spent on this, and where does it actually go most of the time?
Right now, the budget's getting up to around close to, I think, a billion dollars a year.
I don't have that number at my fingertips, so I might be off on that a bit.
But the thing about AmeriCorps, it's not so much the budgetary cost, because what is happening is a lot of former AmeriCorps members have joined activist groups where they're basically pushing for pro-government activism, trying to change the image of the federal government.
And I also want to say there are some AmeriCorps members who really work hard and have helped people who they deal with.
There are some individual AmeriCorps programs which I would not have a lot to criticize on principle.
Whether or not we have any need for the federal government to be paying people to pseudo-volunteer is a whole other question.
Yeah, well, what about corruption, actually, like inside the programs?
It sounds like the kind of thing where it's basically just a cash cow for certain bureaucrats, and so far probably, I would think, off the radar screen of most of the rest of the government.
Like the Justice Department isn't sending Inspector General types over there to check their books all the time or anything.
Well, it does have an Inspector General.
At times the Inspector General has been fairly effective.
I'm not sure about the current Inspector General, but I was investigating this program back in 1999 and went down to Mississippi and I was reading some of the annual reports that the programs there had filed with Washington, and I came across a program that said it was paying people to go door-to-door to sign up people for food stamps, and I thought that was kind of an unusual AmeriCorps program.
So I went down there and talked to the people up in the Mississippi Delta who were running this program, and they were pretty evasive.
It was kind of strange how evasive they were.
So I got back to Washington, I talked to the people in the AmeriCorps Inspector General office, laid out what I found.
The people in the IG office started taking a look at it.
It turned out that what the program was actually doing, it was stacking the payroll with ghost employees.
And you found that out and turned that over to the Inspector General guy?
I didn't find out that they were stacking the payroll with ghost employees, but I made a lot of notes and I'd done some digging before I went down there, and I just kind of laid out to the Inspector General and the Assistant Inspector General what I'd come across down there and said, you know, this is real fishy.
And then they started digging.
I think the FBI looked into it, too.
And the head of the program, the director of the program, was convicted on 15 felony counts and sent to prison in 2002.
But, you know, AmeriCorps was tainted from the get-go.
Back in its early years, its members were often used for backdrops for photo opportunities when President Clinton would arrive on the tarmac when he was traveling around the country.
In the early years, they were often involved in political advocacy or petitioning.
The ACORN group got over a million dollars from AmeriCorps, and there were a lot of questions how it was used.
And the scandals are still going on because last fall there was a St. Hope Academy program in Sacramento, California, which disbarred after an IG investigation found that AmeriCorps members have been detailed to serve as personal assistants to the Academy's founder, to perform menial work for the Academy, and to engage in political campaigning to the benefit of the St. Hope Charter School.
It sounds like we'd be at least, you know, if not better off, we'd be right where we were if they all did nothing but pad their roles with ghost employees.
The rest of this sounds like just a big joke.
And as I was saying earlier, part of the reason this is popular is because it helps change, it polishes, it burnishes the image of government.
Something which AmeriCorps headquarters does is encourage local programs to organize AmeriCorps for a day event with elected officials, which helps them get them on board as supporters.
One thing that's happened a number of times is AmeriCorps has had these various house building projects, and a congressman or a bunch of congressmen will come by and hammer a few nails, and then AmeriCorps or the local group will issue a press release naming and praising those members of Congress as pillars of virtue.
Yeah, well, and you say in your article here, which I guess I didn't mention, it's National Disservice at the American Conservative Magazine's website, mconmag.com, National Disservice.
And you say in here, too, that when AmeriCorps shows up, I guess with or without a congressman, at a site where people are already volunteering, they go ahead and mark that all down as a success, as though they were the ones who got everyone to volunteer, even if they just kind of show up after the fact.
Right.
AmeriCorps has always operated on the Tom Sawyer model of virtue.
It's some people getting paid to sway other people to work for free.
Yeah, well, it sounds reasonable enough.
That's what I would do.
I always had a lot of sympathy for Tom Sawyer, what can I say?
Yeah, me too.
It's hard for me to see that.
You need to find a new phrase for that that makes it sound more harsh, you know?
You just call it the Republican definition of virtue, maybe.
Well, but it was Bill Clinton who started this program.
Oh, yeah.
Well, now, what did George Bush do with it?
I mean, I guess all this stuff you're mentioning here just sounds like the ball's been rolling steadily along.
But did George Bush do anything to expand or contract it?
Yeah, George Bush expanded the program a lot right after 9-11.
George Bush talked about expanding AmeriCorps as if it would be like a counterpunch to Osama bin Laden.
To prove how free we all are.
Right.
There was a lot of stuff in there.
Bush hyped it.
There was Bush's first AmeriCorps chief, Leslie Lemkowski.
About a month after 9-11, he told AmeriCorps members that, quote, the daily duties that you perform will also be helping to thwart terrorism itself.
And he said that AmeriCorps members, that their efforts are, quote, as important to our nation's security and well-being as the actions of American troops at that moment fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And he was talking about the puppet shows, right?
I mean, he wasn't going to put them all in camouflage on the street corner or anything.
Leaving that for Obama?
I'm not sure if Lemkowski specified which AmeriCorps activities he was thinking of at that moment.
I'm hoping it was the puppet shows.
Because, see, here's my problem is when we get to Obama years.
Now they're talking about making this thing, here's the magic word, quote, it's right here, I'm reading it with my eyeballs, required.
And this means for every kid or everybody or what?
What is this?
Well, you know, this is something that they're hinting at at this point.
But this giveback calls for a congressional commission on civic service, which will consider the effect on the nation if all individuals in the U.S. were required to perform a certain amount of national service.
I mean, this is aside from paying taxes.
And whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed.
I mean, this is basically what they're thinking about is canceling the 13th Amendment prohibition on involuntary servitude.
But it is so funny to have congressmen in charge of this as if, you know, the congressmen are going to sit there and say, do we deserve more power over everybody else?
Would that be good for Americans' character?
Boy, that's a rough question on Capitol Hill.
Yeah, well, it sounds like it might as well already be a done deal.
Well, I don't know that it's a done deal because I think if they actually move to this, that it could quickly become a quagmire.
I think there would be a lot of resistance.
I would hope there would be.
And I think there would be a lot more mockery of these kind of things.
Flip side is the state of Maryland, for instance, mandated a certain number of hours of so-called service activities in order to get your high school diploma.
And there was a little pissing and moaning at first, and then people rolled over and accepted it, which I was very disappointed by.
Yeah, it's all – everybody can – people can get used to the, you know, frog in the boiling pot, turn it up slowly kind of thing.
It always – they always do.
And you're right.
I mean, the – what is that really other than involuntary servitude, being forced to do community service, again, which is volunteerism, what, on public property cutting their grass or, you know, the government's grass or some crap, in order to get your degree or in order to graduate from high school?
Right.
Well, I mean, it's sort of a paradox.
If somebody wants to graduate from high school and get a high school diploma in Maryland, the person doesn't really have to read very well, they don't really have to have their cards stamped as far as a certain number of so-called volunteer activities.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it is – I don't think hyperbole at all to call that slavery.
I mean, that's – slavery, that's what that is.
It's forcing somebody to work for whatever wage you say, and they're not allowed to quit.
That's what this is.
I mean, that's what these people are pushing toward, it looks like.
Well, yeah, I just – but the thing that fascinates me here is the moral principle that the congressmen think they would have the right to compel other Americans to do service because the congressmen themselves have done such a horrendous job of serving the American people.
Yeah, well, this is a way that they can rectify that.
Yeah.
Oh, it's a great solution.
You know, why is it that with every problem, Washington always wins as far as a solution?
Yeah, they got the double-sided coin, I think, is the thing.
Here's the other thing, too.
You quote this in the article where they say that, you know – I guess it's in the bill that they just passed calling for the commission or to create the commission.
They say that they want to look into something that would incorporate the best aspects of military service, which means that's the killing people part of it or the sleeping in bump beds?
What are they talking about?
Yeah, I mean, the best aspects of military service.
That was a hell of a phrase.
I mean, that's the kind of phrase where you're just sitting there reading some dull bill and you think, here's a red alarm.
Yeah, you know – I'm picturing having to stand by my footlocker while some jerk screams in my face about how my bed's not made right or some garbage, you know?
Ah, memories of Boy Scouts.
Yeah, well, I saw that movie Full Metal Jacket is all it was, really.
Okay, well, no, it's a very strange notion because, you know, the best aspect of military – for them to be writing in the bill about how they aspire that this new program, the National Civilian Community Corps is going to be, you know, combine the best aspects of civilian service with the best aspects of military service.
I mean, the most important aspect of military service is the absolute subordination.
I mean, that you are subjugated.
You are a tool of the people above you.
And this has a big appeal in Washington because, you know, it means a lot more power.
It means a lot more prestige, a lot more opportunity for people, you know, in more ways than one.
Do you think this has anything to do with Obama, his statement, I guess, during the campaign that we need to have a civilian national security force that's, what, I guess is well-prepared?
A civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, and just as well-funded.
Yeah, so now is he talking about just the FBI and the DHS and local police kind of thing, that our local civilian cops need to be well-prepared?
Or was he saying what we need to do is create a new agency here, a new, what, Gestapo of stupid, lazy Americans?
I don't know.
I can't see Americans putting on their brown shirt.
They'd have to get up off the couch to change.
Well, there you go.
Well, you know, as far as this phrase, just as powerful, I don't think he was thinking of giving nuclear weapons to Mayberry, but it's kind of hard to know what he meant.
My impression is he might have even blown smoke a bit there.
There's times where his rhetoric becomes like sing-song, and that may have been one of them, or maybe he's got actual plans there.
But it is somewhat encouraging that there is some backlash on these things, and actually maybe there isn't nearly as much backlash as there should be so far.
Well, and he's just getting started.
I think Americans, and this is the kind of thing that you talk about in your greatest of all your great books, Attention Deficit Democracy, is just how badly people want to believe in this state.
They want to believe in it so bad.
The whole George Washington never told a lie.
He admitted that one time he did a bad thing and chopped down the cherry tree.
And everything is, they want to believe so bad in this guy.
I saw Jim Cafferty on CNN talking about the new poll results say that everybody hates Congress, everybody hates Wall Street, everybody hates government in general, but they love President Barack Obama.
They just love this man, and they trust in him, and they're willing to give him another however many hundred days until he gets it right.
Well, you know, it's poll results like that that make it hard for me to keep my rose-colored glasses on.
Yeah, well, the thing is, yeah, too, if you lift them up you can see.
Although, you know, if you polish them just a little bit and focus on that, it does seem like if everybody's basically completely fed up, and the economy is bad and getting worse, and obviously whatever government is doing about that is only making that worse, maybe that hate will start to infect his aura of savior and hero and all that.
George Bush was at 90% there for a little while, but people finally turned on him.
Well, it's too bad that the cost of Bush's approval rating following him was huge numbers of dead people and much of the world left ravaged, and the American legal system left in tatters.
I will be curious to see how the ongoing economic decline at some point catches up with Obama, because this is pretty soon going to be his baby.
He's flip-flopped so many times, and his people are making so many horrendous decisions.
I don't think his tax law is going to work nearly as well as Ronald Reagan's.
Yeah, well, and speaking of that, there are a lot of people who are pointing, well, hell, I'm pointing at the likelihood of massive unemployment, and I guess they're already talking about Hooverville tent cities being built up there somewhere in Northern California or something.
It looks like there could be a lot of domestic upheaval, and some people I've heard saying that they think it's going to be like the 1930s and the possibility of the total revolutionary kind of fervor in the country and craziness all around and people going hungry and that kind of thing.
At the same time, we've seen over these past years, and as you've written about at the American Conservative Magazine for one example, also for the Future Freedom Foundation, that more and more holes are being poked in the Posse Comitatus statute, and, of course, I guess there was the short-lived attempt to completely rewrite Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act there for a little while, but they did go ahead and create a new standing active brigade under the Northern Command for the American Theater of Operations.
Speaking of the troops on the streets of Alabama, when that one guy went on a shooting rampage and then killed himself, do you think that this is the kind of thing that Americans are really going to have to deal with in their maybe even near-future troops on the streets of our cities?
I don't know.
I hope it doesn't come to that, but it's interesting.
There are places in the country where the troops could subjugate people pretty fast, but there are huge parts of this country where the government would simply not be able to maintain control.
There was a story that comes to mind here.
I was traveling in the mountains of Western North Carolina in August 2001, and that was about two years after the guy who was allegedly the Olympic bomber had fled up to those mountains.
Shortly after he was reportedly up there, the FBI made a big announcement.
They were sending like 200 of their best agents there to find him, and the FBI came pouring into that part of the mountains of Western North Carolina.
They were taking over hotels.
They were throwing people out of rooms.
This is what I was told.
I didn't verify it.
They were domineering in restaurants and stuff like that, and the FBI was thinking, was this the only question of time until we get this guy?
Eric Rudolph was the guy.
The FBI was there for a long time and never got him.
They finally cowered away with their tail between their legs, but the media, of course, didn't bother reporting that part.
Eric Rudolph was eventually caught by some deputy sheriff when he ran into one of the back roads up there.
That's a story that symbolized to me that there are a lot of places in this country where the government can come in with massive force, and they will not get obedience.
They might not be shot at, but it's the same as threw up in a lot of parts of Idaho.
What happened when they went in to get Randy Weaver?
I was going to say, Alan Bach's book, Ambush at Ruby Ridge, talks about that quite a bit in that book, where he went and talked to the people at the local restaurants and that kind of thing, and they said, these guys came in here like Germans.
Right, and it's interesting even reading the official reports about why the FBI did some of the stuff that they did, because the FBI was worried about being attacked from the rear.
There was a gun rights rally I spoke at in D.C. in 1994, and there was a guy who spoke shortly before me from Pennsylvania, and he had one of the best lines I ever heard at a rally like that.
He was up there.
He said that if the FBI came into Pennsylvania and did what they did at Waco, they'd face more guns on the way out than they'd face on the way in.
And he said this right in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, which is a nice touch.
It's good to see Pennsylvania make progress.
But I think that the people in Washington who might be making those kind of decisions would likely greatly exaggerate how much obedience they would get in much of this country, because once you get outside some of the big urban areas, people aren't going to roll over.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I really resent Glenn Beck doing all this fear-mongering and all this predicting these kinds of things as best he can, and never mind the fact that this is all his fault, that it's the empire that he made his millions championing that's brought this country to bankruptcy.
And now he wants to turn around and be Mr. Populist Hero Guy and get every angry white guy out of a job.
I don't see it as on the side of liberty, on the side of the Constitution, the side of sound money and sound principles or anything like that.
It's simply just a bunch of exploiting people's fears for his own gain.
And I think that's just one example.
I'm picking on him because I hate that guy.
But there's a million people like that trying to predict apocalypse and make it that way, and I don't want to be like that and promote the idea, because I think that there's still a lot of wealth in this country, and it seems like we all ought to be able to stay fed, no matter how bad the depression gets here over a few years.
Right.
Well, I mean, a big difference between the 1930s and now is that people are starting out far more affluent at the start than they were in 1929.
I mean, people have got a much bigger cushion in some ways, not necessarily as far as cash in the bank, but just as far as other assets or other situations.
Yeah, well, let's just hope that the government will allow people to take care of each other to a degree that we won't need, quote-unquote, need massive intervention by them.
But, you know, if there's a lot of Hoovervilles around, they're going to be occupied by National Guard troops and stuff, and it's just going to be that way.
Well, I would think that this is the kind of thing that's risky for the government, because if the government comes in domineering, in some places there's going to be – well, if the government comes in heavy-handed, there's going to be heavy-handed response.
That can escalate, and the government's outnumbered.
Well, you know, without them we'd all just kill each other all the time.
So that's what we need is a massive police state so that we don't steal for keeping ourselves alive.
Let's have them provide for us.
Well, they've certainly – you know, it would be nice, Scott, if the government would do for you and I what they've done for AIG.
You know, here's the thing, too.
I think this is a really bad time to try to conscript everybody's kid into National Service, man.
I think people are going to rebel against that pretty bad.
This is why I'm not really that worried about it.
I think this commission is going to say, well, you know, it would be nice if we had a country full of people who are different than these.
They're not going to do it.
Hooverville, you mean?
Yeah, I mean, the Clinton thing.
Clinton tried hard, and it never came to nothing, you know?
Yeah, I think it would be awfully damn hard for them to move forward with this.
But then again, you think back to the immediate aftermath of 9-11 and the public approval rate of government, the number of people that trusted government doubled overnight after 9-11 in the first week or so.
Yeah, even though the worst disaster ever just happened on their watch.
Yeah.
That made me trust them a lot, too.
I've never understood that.
Yeah, that was one of the great mysteries of the new century, so what can I say?
All right, well, I'm going to let you go, Jim.
I know you've got to go.
I appreciate your time on the show today.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on.
I'm happy that California has not corrupted you.
Well, I just got here.
We'll see.
I still don't make enough money to be corrupt, man.
It doesn't cost that much.
Maybe someday.
Yeah, we'll see.
We'll see.
Everybody's got a prize.
I haven't really been tested yet.
Well, all right.
Well, I'm sure you'll pass.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot, Jim.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Jim Bovard.
He's the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, which is really great.
It really, really, really is.
Man, you've got to go and get Attention Deficit Democracy.
He also wrote The Bush Betrayal, Terrorism and Tyranny, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, The Farm Fiasco, The Fair Trade Fraud.
His website is jimbovard.com.
He also writes at the American Conservative Magazine, where he's got his current article, National Disservice, and you can find him also at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org.
And we'll be back right after this.