01/22/10 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
Our first guest on the show is my good friend Jim Bovard.
He's the author of The Fair Trade Fraud and the Farm Fiasco, Freedom in Chains and Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal and Attention Deficit Democracy.
He's a fellow over at the Future Freedom Foundation.
You can find what he writes for them at fff.org.
And of course I should also mention he's written for every major magazine and newspaper in the country.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate that.
Man, I'm really happy to have you here.
And how many of your books did I leave out?
That was the best I could do off the top of my head.
You know, it's close enough for government work.
Yeah, there's still like eight of them in there that I didn't mention, but anyway.
Hey, let's start with this.
What about the new book?
And this isn't this much that there is a new book isn't a secret because you blogged it before.
So tell me all about it.
Well, you know, Scott, that's a great question, which I really appreciate.
What's your next question?
You don't want to answer?
Come on, man.
I'm all pins and needles over here on the edge of my seat.
I want to know all about it.
All right, tell me at least the name of it.
Tell me when it's coming out.
Well, you know, I'm going to bob and weave on that one.
All right.
Or punt is the more accurate sports analogy, I guess.
All right, then.
Well, if that's how you're going to be, fine.
Hey, so when there's crimes, it's the FBI's job to investigate that kind of thing.
Like, well, the ones that break the federal laws, right?
Well, that's the theory.
And that's, you know, that's what I heard in high school civic class.
Well, how's that working out for you?
Well, the high school civics class, I didn't do very well in the class.
But, you know.
You knew better than your teacher already, did you?
You know, you know, I was.
Yeah.
You know, for some reason, I always got teased for cynicism.
Yeah.
Well, and that's good because it's a better way to find the truth with a cynical point of view.
Well, so here's some news regarding the FBI last week.
Apparently there were there was a massive three man murder down there at Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
And according to other Scott Horton, he has reason to believe that.
I don't think he's published yet, but he said on this show that the White House, the National Security Council, intervened to have the Justice Department, the FBI go down to investigate this thing in order to get the cover up into full swing and to make sure that the investigation went nowhere.
And even after the extremely credible witnesses and other Scott Horton story in Harper's magazine talked to the FBI, or after the main witness talked to the FBI, they told him, oh, yeah, we're closing down the investigation.
And he said, yeah, but I know for a fact you haven't even talked to the other witnesses yet.
And they said, OK, well, you know, yeah.
So we got a couple other things to wrap up.
But then, you know, and then it turns out that the lady that told him that that blew him off and was in charge of the cover up at the Department of Justice had her name on the torture memos in the first place from where she used to work at the Office of Legal Counsel.
So now my question is, how likely is it that the FBI is going to investigate the FBI and the Justice Department and the military for murdering those people and covering it up?
And who else do we have, if not the FBI, to investigate these things?
Well, the most important lesson from this story is that America cannot have too many Scott Horton.
I mean, both you and Scott Horton in New York are doing great work on this.
It's a huge damn story.
And I'm glad you had Scott Horton on the air for this real quick on that.
You know what?
There's another Scott Horton who I haven't interviewed yet, but I want to, who is a paraplegic and is a wheelchair skater.
And I've seen the pictures of him.
And he doesn't just ride the pools in his wheelchair.
He absolutely rules, Jim.
You should see the pictures of him.
He rides at the top of the pools.
He does flips and handrails and stuff on the fun box.
The guy's insane.
So there's a real heroic Scott Horton for you there, a guy who's paralyzed and still skates.
Well, I wonder how he got paralyzed.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not sure I want to know.
Maybe skateboarding.
Yeah, well, I hate to have my cynical reflex there, but the thing that strikes me about this Scott Horton-Harper story is it is such an absolute bombshell for several reasons.
You know, it sounds like from what he said that there may be very clear evidence of cover-ups going to the very top of the Pentagon, and also now from what he said, perhaps the White House as well.
And at some point, one of these damn stories is going to blow up, and the lid is going to come off, and once the lid comes off for one story, it'll be a lot easier to pry out some of the other stories.
Well, you'd like to think so.
In fact, I think it was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has an editorial that says, Enough is enough.
Because here's part of this news story, right, is that it's not the New York Times or the Washington Post, obviously.
In fact, the best they've done so far is run a one-AP story about it, I think.
But this is the other Scott Horton, who's a professor at Columbia, who's the former chair of the International Commission on Human Rights for the New York Bar Association, who lectures at Hofstra Law School, who's writing in Harper's, the oldest continuously published piece of journalism in America, founded in the 1840s or something.
I mean, that in itself is something, right, that this isn't, you know, what's-his-name-that-made-up-the-indictment-of-Karl Rove or whatever who wrote this.
How can this be ignored?
It's in Harper's!
Well, yeah, okay, I was trying to make sure I got in at least one Bovard laugh.
I need it, thanks.
But that's okay, I don't mind.
You know, the thing about Scott Horton, the lawyer, is that he's credible.
And if you look at what he said on the torture scandal, he's followed it very closely.
And I'm not aware of him making any serious, significant mistakes over the last six years now, almost.
And he's been very careful.
I mean, there are some folks out there who are critics of the government, who kind of tend to-who are somewhat more prone to hyperbole and exaggerate.
But Scott Horton is not one of them.
I mean, he's just-he's been on the money.
Part of my frustration with the entire torture scandal is, from early on, there were government reports out by that Filipino-American general, Taguba, I think it was.
Yeah.
A magnificent report, laid stuff out.
This is a guy who had great courage, wrecked his entire career, basically, because of it.
But it was laid out there what happened.
Then later on, September 1994, there was another report by another general who, again, laid out the outrages that were going on.
And the establishment media has found a way to side rail or ignore those.
And it looks like the same thing has been happening so far with this Scott Horton expose.
But I'm hopeful that there will be enough elbows and nudging and damn outrage on this.
Has he been contacted by anybody from Capitol Hill on this?
I'm not sure.
As far as I know, I'm sure he's trying.
Well, okay.
Well, you know, it's a hell of a thing when the Harpers and this guy come out with this expose and he has to go knocking on doors on Capitol Hill.
I mean, goodness gracious.
This is the kind of thing, if Congressmen were doing their job, they would say, you know, let's give this guy a call and find out what he knows.
Well, and it did get on Olbermann.
I mean, this is what's fun for me is that how many, you know, at least half of these media people watch cable TV all day and night and whatever.
So they know about this story, but they all somehow decided that they weren't interested in it or their bosses decided for them that they weren't interested in it.
And so far it's just, if you go to Google News, you can read about it in every paper in the world except in America.
Well, this is typical how the torture scandal has gone.
Sometimes it takes a while for the second wave of things to come out.
But the thing that struck me was, you know, this is just not killing of, alleged killing of the detainees, but I would think with the details and the apparent very strong evidence of a cover-up that this goes so far, I would hope that that would be like blood in the water as far as pulling into more media sharks.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out over and over again on his blog, the media are guilty.
All these, you know, media stars at the Post, at the Times, at all the cable TV news shows and whatever, these are the people who lied us into war.
These are the people who told us for a decade that we're talking about some enhanced interrogation techniques, and after all, the president can do that if he wants because he's the president.
Don't you watch 24 and whatever?
They're just as responsible.
So, and they're the ones who, when the military said, oh, yeah, these guys all killed themselves in an act of war against us, they dutifully repeated that.
So for them to, you know, go after that blood in the water, they have to indict themselves, and they'd rather not.
They'd rather pretend that everyone knew there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or everybody thought there were, and everybody thought that the torture thing was more or less okay, and everybody thought whatever wrong things that they all have their consensus about.
And so on it goes.
And it's not even just that they're, you know, MSNBC is owned by General Electric or whatever.
It's that all the people they hire are really all that thick-headed, you know?
Well, not all of them because there have been some good folks that really put their careers in line to push these stories forward a little bit, and it might be that even as you and I are talking, that there might be some folks who are trying to dig.
I mean, sometimes it's not just a question of a cowardly journalist.
It's a question of a journalist who wants to pursue it, but there's some editor who's saying, well, I don't think so.
Well, we have to wait until.
.
.
I experienced that a number of times, that there would be some editor who was worried about getting a call from the government and not necessarily threatening to do anything to him, but just kind of, you know, tutting the guy, and that just makes him timid and gun-shy.
But the story isn't over, and maybe there will be some other really great bombshells coming because it certainly sounds like, and it's really great that you've got some of the former guards that get with the courage to stand up and act like patriots on this.
Yeah, well, talking with Brandon Neely and also with Daniel Lakemacher a few months back, there are more and more of them coming out.
And, you know, this is kind of the overriding theme of the terror war, right, is that it's based on this big lie that they hate us just because of how crazy and evil and religious they are, which means that they couldn't possibly be dealt with.
There is no earthly or political reason, you know, to understand what they're doing or to change policy in any way to account for that.
So here we are in an endless war where we're going to have an endless number of people abducted.
You know, Cheney promised it would take generations.
There's no reason to doubt him on that by looking at a year into the Obama administration.
You kind of have to abandon law.
I mean, what are you going to do with all these people, except kidnap them, torture them, sometimes to death, and then cover it up and whatever?
You can't have an empire and a law at the same time, really, can you?
Don't know.
Well, it's certainly a very difficult contradiction, but the thing that's striking is the brazenness of the crimes of the U.S. government off and on over the last seven or eight years, and a lot of what's happened to Guantanamo, which should be classified as a crime, especially if you're killing detainees and then lying about it.
But, you know, the chances of people being prosecuted for that, you know, it's sad that there were a number of good things that Obama said before he got elected as far as rule of law and stuff like that, but it seems like it's all gotten swallowed up by an asterisk.
You know, an old friend of mine had a funny conspiracy theory that the only reason that Ken Starr was put in charge of making such a big deal out of that Lewinsky case was that it was all a conspiracy to get the independent counsel statute repealed.
Oh, that's interesting.
Or to let it expire.
And I think he was kind of half-joking, but then again, boy, they sure do like not having that independent counsel statute up there anymore, right?
Well, and it's just, you know...
And those were the days in the 90s.
It was like the cover of the newspaper every single day had a new independent prosecutor to go after some cabinet official or another or even Clinton himself.
Well, the thing about it is that, okay, there were some flaws with the independent counsel statute.
I mean, there were some, you know, things that did not work perfectly, but the whole reason that was put in there was that it's a dream to assume that the government is going to do a fair investigation of itself.
And everything that's happened since that independent counsel law expired has proven that to be true.
There have been so many government crimes that should have been investigated, and yet it seems like it's a two-party conspiracy against justice.
So now tell me about this scandal where, I guess in this case, nobody's getting in trouble for it, but it was like the in-house internal affairs at the FBI, not even the inspector general, but some other highfalutin-sounding organization within the FBI that came out and said, same story different day or different story, that they've been abusing their powers of administrative subpoena and their national security letters in order to, I guess in this case, snoop on telephone records.
Well, this is an abuse from the Patriot Act, the national security letters.
The Patriot Act made it very easy for the FBI to go in there and basically write its own search warrant.
However, there were FBI agents who felt like that was too much of a bother, so instead of filling in the blanks in the form, they just kind of give the telephone companies or other targets, they give them Post-it notes.
Oh yeah, send us Joe Blow's phone records.
And a Post-it note is even kind of a low standard by the Patriot Act.
So what happened was that the people in the FBI knew this.
It was done thousands of times.
Each time was a federal crime because it was a clear violation of people's privacy rights under federal law.
And yet part of the miracle here is that you had thousands of FBI crimes, but there are no FBI criminals, because I think it was the general counsel for the FBI said that there was simply a bunch of good-hearted mistakes.
Yeah, well that's like Ahmed Chalabi, right?
Heroes in error.
Yeah, I should check that to make sure she was the lady that said that.
But the phrase that stuck in my mind was, it was a good-hearted error.
I think like, you know, that's the same way that the FBI treats suspected people, private citizens, that they accuse of violating laws.
Good-hearted error, no sweat.
Well, and that's what they say in the torture memos, too.
It's in your book, Attention Deficit Democracy, that if you kill them, we know that you only killed them in an attempt to prevent a greater harm, so it's okay.
But try not to.
Yeah.
That was right in there, right?
Yeah, that was plucked out of the famous memo that John Yoo wrote back in August 2002, in which he was talking about the possible defenses which could be used if some federal torturer killed a detainee.
You know, and there was one truckload of BS after another.
I found that quote that is from the FBI General Counsel of a lady, Valerie Caproni.
And she said that what the FBI did was a, quote, good-hearted but not well-thought-out solution as far as seizing the information illegally.
And she said what this turned out to be was a self-inflicted wound.
But, you know, it's a self-inflicted wound, but nobody at the FBI is going to bleed from this.
Yeah, well, they've got sovereign immunity and all that, right?
Well, sovereign immunity, and plus you've got the news media lined up to burn us to our boots as far as the eye can see.
Well, and nobody to prosecute them but themselves.
Oh, that's true.
That's true.
The thought of the Justice Department cracking down on the FBI, it's kind of like, it ain't going to happen.
So here again we have the government confessing thousands of crimes.
Nothing's going to happen.
Well, and, you know, people say things like, you know, well, we don't need to go back and prosecute because people just, they don't want to see the spectacle of Dick Cheney and George Bush and the rest of them on trial and going to prison or whatever.
They just can't even imagine it.
And they know that that would be the end result of a real investigation, a real criminal investigation, to the people that ran the last administration.
So they say, well, we just need to make sure the stuff doesn't happen again.
We just need to prevent it in the future and change the policy and what have you.
But if nobody from the NSA or the FBI or the CIA go to jail for tapping our phones or torturing people to death or anything else, then how else do you prevent it from happening again other than making an example out of what happened to the guys who did it last time?
They went to prison.
Well, you know, I think what's probably going to happen in this specific case is that the FBI will probably offer more ethics training for their FBI agents.
Oh, yeah, some more touchy-feely, like on, was it Penn & Teller bullshit, where they did the sensitivity training and all that?
I think the term you're looking for is circle jerk.
Yeah, you can make a lot of money teaching classes like that, according to Penn & Teller there.
Well, you know, I always figured that I chose the wrong career direction, but maybe it's not too late.
I might be able to get a reference from the FBI.
You know, I quite illegally downloaded that entire series because I don't have all these fancy premium movie channels.
Okay.
And that was what I thought over and over and over again watching that show, was I'm in the wrong line of work.
Nobody wants the truth, Jim.
What they want is a line of crap.
Sell them some magic crystals and some Nostradamus and some wheatgrass shakes and whatever, they'll do whatever you say and they'll give you as much as you demand.
Well, you know, I think on an hourly basis, shoveling BS pays a lot better than telling the truth.
Sure seems to.
So tell me this, because, you know, at the risk of being patronizing the audience, I don't want to be patronizing, but then again, I also know from the so-called opinion polls and whatever that people don't even really know what the Bill of Rights is.
So, you know, that whole don't know what you've got until it's gone kind of thing.
I was wondering if you could explain what the Fourth Amendment has to say about, never even mind the abuse, but just about having, you know, where they're not even following their own guidelines, but just about having, you know, warrantless searches, national security letters and such things in the first place.
And then also, you know, I know you can also tell them about Amendment No.
5 and 6 and what it says about the power of the state to lock people away.
Well, the...
What are the exceptions to these amendments?
Well, you know, there's the old version of the Fourth Amendment, then there's the new version, and the last I checked, the new version says that the government needs a good excuse before it steals your private information.
Yeah, a good excuse, as according to them.
Yeah, so, you know, and the government, the judge of its own excuses.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches, which in most cases means the government needs a warrant, and it needs to persuade an independent magistrate or a judge on why it should be allowed to seize somebody's records or seize their property for a criminal investigation, things like that.
So that's the thumbnail.
And what's happened is that this, you know, the...
It was funny watching in 2006, once the news came out about the so-called terrorist surveillance program, which was the National Security Agency's wireless wiretaps on thousands of people, and then the roundup of tens of millions of people's phone calling records, you know, a conservative was trying to do a redefinition of the Fourth Amendment, saying that the Fourth Amendment prohibited unreasonable searches as if that was the end of it, and since what the president was doing or ordering NSA to do, since that was reasonable, that meant it was automatically constitutional.
And it's just fascinating to see this dumbing down of the Bill of Rights, because that's what it came down to.
And yet there were a lot of conservatives who would just kind of nod their heads and kind of figure that if George Bush and Dick Cheney didn't think that the government had to seize this information without a warrant, then, you know, they wouldn't have done it.
Well, and that's the whole thing about it, too, is that...
Well, there's lots of whole things about it.
One of the parts of the whole thing about it is that this is the cause of the American Revolution.
The king's writs of assistance have said that his thugs can go in any house and do whatever they want and don't have to ask anybody else.
I mean, and frankly, having a cop ask a judge is a joke of a check and balance in the first place.
Even Thomas Paine said so.
But still, I mean, at least that was the old rules, and sometimes you'd have a judge, you know, be skeptical of the executive, right?
Well, and part of the benefit here, even if the judge does routinely rubber stamp the church warrant, it forces the law enforcement people to put on record why they're going after for certain information.
And if a criminal suit comes up later, then it's possible to say, okay, this is what the government claimed, and very often it turned out the government was using false information.
That's happened in drug cases all the time.
All right, so I guess, though, the security statists would argue that, Jim, come on, even if the FBI is abusing these warrants to the degree that they admit, maybe even a little more than that, we're still talking about mostly bad guys, you know, whose quote-unquote rights are being abused.
It's not like they're really violating all of our rights and searching all of our houses and all of our financial records and all of our phone records with this kind of bogus warrant, are they?
Well, it's interesting how folks define different crimes, because if someone said that murder wasn't a problem unless 5% of the population got killed, people would kind of shake their head and say, well, that's a really dumb argument.
One of the biggest problems of this illegal government surveillance the last eight years was we have no idea who's been wiretapped, who's been surveilled, what information's been seized.
It might have been you, it might have been me, or it might have been some of your listeners.
It might be that people who post comments on AntiWar.com put themselves under heightened suspicion for being wiretapped, or maybe not.
But there's no reason to assume the government is being reasonable or confident or fair-minded in who it's targeting here.
All right, well, now teach us about the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, too, if you could.
Fifth Amendment, due process, oh God, okay.
Come on, Jim, pop quiz, man.
What is the point you want me to make, Scott?
Well, that, for example, it doesn't say in there anything about U.S. citizens.
It just says persons, being anyone under the control of the national government, is obvious right there in the language of it, that everybody gets a lawyer, everybody has the right to cross-examine the witnesses against them.
Yeah, I'm not sure it says everybody gets a lawyer, but .
.
.
Well, they have a right to counsel for their defenses right in Amendment 5, isn't it?
Well .
.
.
I don't have either in front of me, either.
Right, right, well, yeah, I mean, it doesn't guarantee everybody a lawyer, but I think it says that they have the right to pursue counsel or something like that, so .
.
.
Compulsory process for .
.
. oh, no, that's for witnesses and their defense.
That's not for obtaining counsel.
That's something else, a positive right in the Fifth Amendment there.
Anyway, point is, if the U.S. government is going to lock someone in prison and keep them there, they have to give them a trial first, right?
Well, yeah, this goes to the idea of habeas corpus, which is in the Constitution per se, not in the Bill of Rights.
So, I mean, because the Founding Fathers were horrified at how some English kings had gone to Parliament and dragged out the critics and thrown them in the Tower of London.
And that was the kind of thing that focuses the mind of a politician.
So the habeas corpus was put in there.
It had been recognized, I think, in the English Bill of Rights in 1689 or so, I think, just after the Great Revolution.
But this is something which had been tacitly in there since the Magna Carta in 1215.
However, I mean, this is a real basic principle and a real test of reasonable government.
But George Bush suspended that in November 2001 when he had the right to label anybody an enemy combatant and hold them forever without charges.
And unfortunately, that's still the policy of the land, if not the law of the land.
I mean, that really is something when you think about a king granting a privilege to some people in 1215.
A king saying, OK, I'll allow you to have writs of habeas corpus.
And now in America in the 21st century, we're willing to give that up, and to lesser men even than King John.
Well, and it's sad that folks have surrendered so many of their rights because they just think, well, this will only be used against bad guys.
People have way too much faith in how politicians define bad guys, because with the hardcore left wing, it might be gun owners.
With the hardcore right wing, it might be people that, well, anyhow, it doesn't make any sense to let the government have that arbitrary power.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I always wonder how many people can learn the lesson when the power flips, right?
Because you have, for example, that Department of Homeland Security report saying anybody who's basically a right wing populist of any kind is probably a militia guy and a white supremacist and a danger and all this.
And yet it was the Bush administration that, I mean, it didn't come out until the Obama administration, but it was the Bush Homeland Security Department that put that thing together.
And, I mean, that's really nothing but chickens and home and roosting and all those things, right?
Absolutely.
These are the people who said, go, Bush, do whatever you want.
Right.
That's a very good example.
And it's sad that it hasn't resonated, that folks still think that it doesn't matter.
If government's off the leash, it's not going to bite them personally.
Well, and, you know, I had Ron Paul on the show yesterday, and then I just played this State of the Republic speech that he recorded and put out here.
And the man sounds pretty pessimistic.
And basically it comes down to, I think, the possibility of major unrest with a 20-something plus percent unemployment rate for a long period of time.
They either have to destroy the dollar or they have to crank the interest rates up through the roof.
Either way, anybody who's not a millionaire or a billionaire, maybe even the millionaires, anybody who's not a billionaire in this society is basically screwed for the long term.
And he brings up all of this so-called legal precedent that we're talking about here, the Bush policy that Obama has ratified that, you know, says that the authorization to use force against Osama bin Laden authorizes the president to do whatever he wants and all that, all this, that all these things are all coming home right at a time when there's going to be quite likely major conflict in this society and a lawless and arbitrary and supremely well-armed national government with no more old law binding its authority.
Well, the government might be well-armed, but it's not invincible.
Well, I think back to a couple of things around Waco and Ruby Ridge.
People forget that the FBI, once they went out there and enforced in upper northern Idaho, I mean, the FBI was very worried because a lot of people, once they laid siege to the Weavers, a lot of people started coming up and kind of camping out in the outside around the FBI.
So it wasn't really clear who was going to be under siege last.
Well, and that was one of the things that really helped kick the movement off in the first place.
Back then was the Weaver siege.
And I guess, you know, there are a lot of extremely politically incorrect type of people up there already and whatever in Idaho, I don't know how many there were at that time.
But, you know, they did seem to learn a lesson from that a little, at least from Waco, that when they laid siege to the Republic of Texas secessionists and the Montana freemen, they didn't pick a major fight because I don't know how worried they were that people were going to come out of the woodwork with rifles, but it must have been on their mind somewhat.
Yeah, I was pleased that the FBI, especially with the confrontation with the Montana freemen in 1996, the FBI acted with restraint and relatively reasonably.
And, you know, it worked out a lot better to have the people peacefully surrender and things got, you know, they handled it in the courts instead of with a gun battle where the first targets are certainly going to lose, but, you know, we would not know where it would end.
But it's amazing to see the kind of lies and cover-ups the government's gotten away with in the last 18 years since Ruby Ridge.
Well, it would be really nice to think that, you know, worse comes to worse and there are general warrants going out and people being arrested and guardsmen everywhere and riots and whatever that at least you'd have a chance in front of a judge to say, Judge, you've got to listen to me.
They got the wrong guy.
Or, Judge, you've got to listen to me.
All I was doing was standing there.
Or, Judge, you've got to listen to me.
All I was doing was stealing an apple to keep my kid alive.
Or whatever it is, and not just be turned over to, you know, the new Guantanamo in Illinois and kept forever.
Well, I would think that if the government tries to do that kind of crackdown, I think there are a number of individuals in the military, the National Guard, and others who would not carry out those orders.
And I would think it only takes, you know, two or three or four or five percent of people kind of yanking in their reins and pretty soon the entire units would be paralyzed.
So I'm not convinced that the government could use those forces very effectively against the American people.
Well, and how paranoid am I about how bad this unemployment thing is going to be and for how long and what kind of social chaos might come as a result of it, you know?
It sort of seems like it's, you know, the beginning of 1930 right now or something, and we're just getting started.
I'm not sure.
I mean, it's hard to make heads or tails out of the situation.
I've been surprised at some of the developments over the last year.
I've been surprised at how some of the things bounced back.
I think the feds have been kind of doing a hell of a lot of tampering in the markets, but it's also, I don't know.
I mean, I think there are some folks who have been pessimistic ever since 1971 when Nixon took the nation off the gold standard.
So this guy Volcker, he's one of the guys, as you just said, who helped engineer taking us off the gold standard in the first place and the breakdown of Bretton Woods.
And I guess if he hadn't have done that, Ron Paul would have never run for Congress, so at least there's one silver lining out of that.
But other than that, this guy Volcker is also famous for, in the 1980s, he was brought in to really beat inflation the only way you can, which is, well, as long as you have a fractional reserve banking system, which is cranking up the interest rates through the roof and forcing the recession that they'd refused to have all through the 1970s with all that inflation.
And now here's this same guy, and he was Rockefeller's man, David Rockefeller's man over there at the Chase Manhattan Bank back then.
I think he probably retired before they merged with J.P. Morgan, I don't really know.
But anyway, so now he is here, that Barack Obama's right hand, and according to the news, he's making a move kind of as an advisor to Obama with, I'm not sure what his official position is, but against Geithner, and saying, you know, forget what the Treasury Secretary wants, what we need to do is some degree of reintroducing the Glass-Steagall Act and reforming the entire shape of Wall Street.
That's how Alan Greenspan's wife Andrea Mitchell was announcing it on MSNBC today.
It'll be the end of Wall Street as we know it.
What do you know about what's going on there?
Not much, but, you know, as far as being upset about the loss of inclusive Geithner, I mean, he's been an absolute disaster.
He was a fiasco from day one.
I think the same with the current Federal Reserve Chief.
There's a lot of people who share a lot of blame for the banking collapse and the completely unjust bailout, and Geithner is one of those folks, as is Bernanke and quite a few others who have been tight with the Obama administration.
And I certainly don't endorse what Volcker is doing, but it's such an utter mess at this point that the government came in to bail out banks that should have gone bankrupt.
Financial companies that should have been wiped out by Chapter 11 are now giving billion-dollar bonuses, and politicians are outraged, but it's the politicians that make those bonuses possible.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's one of these weird things, too, right, where you don't want to say any and all deregulation is good, because then all they'll do is just deregulate how much fraud these guys are allowed to commit.
They never deregulate the part where we've got to bail them out.
And so, in fact, I saw where Anthony Gregory found an old Ron Paul speech from, I guess, 1998, when they passed the Phil Graham Act, which there's clue number one that something's wrong when Phil Graham's behind it.
Well, but he's from Texas.
Yeah, well, that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Texas is a great place, but Phil Graham is the damned devil, and everybody in the whole world knows it.
You don't have to be from Texas to know that.
But anyway, what he did, though, was he took away the limits on how much of regular people's savings they could gamble and that kind of thing, and regular people's investments that they could gamble in their crazy little private casinos and all that.
And Ron Paul gave a speech back then saying, listen, as long as we have fractional reserve banking, as long as we have a central bank that is an engine of all this inflation, the last thing we want to do is deregulate the ability of all these different kinds of banks to merge together into even larger behemoths that will be even more bound to bail out.
That's Ron Paul 12 years ago.
That's great.
That's great.
So, is it possible that this is actually, could be what Obama and Volcker are proposing here?
I mean, like Harry Brown said, Volcker was the best Fed chairman we ever had.
If you have to have a Fed chairman, at least he came in and licked inflation.
Of course, he caused it in the first place, but never mind that.
Is it possible that his idea for re-regulating these banks in more of a New Deal way is actually a good idea, as long as we accept the premise that we're going to have a central banking system?
Well, I don't know if I'd go that far, Scott, but I do know that with the de facto federal bailout guarantee that these big banks have had over the last few years, that's completely, that's a mockery of the free market.
And it's something which has given capitalism a hell of a black eye, and it's not a black eye that's going to go away in the next year or two, because this is going to taint advocates of a market economy for a long time, unfairly to a high degree, but this is what's seen as personifying capitalism, and unfortunately, that's how the game is going to be played.
So, I don't know.
I mean, Harry Brown's comment on Volcker, I think, sounds fairly accurate to me.
He was certainly a whole lot better than most of the other Federal Reserve chairmen.
These are the kinds of decisions we're left to make.
Which of our imperial overlords is probably better at destroying the economy a little bit less than the others?
And then we end up with our best hope is the guy that helped engineer taking us off the gold standard for Rockefeller and Nixon back in 1971.
I might be stuck in the wrong dimension, Jim.
I'm pretty sure this is not where I belong.
I guess you're talking about California, or what?
Yeah, well, that might be a little bit of it, too.
Okay, well, you know, give my greetings to the Valley Girls.
All right, everybody, that's Jim Bovard.
You can find his blog at jimbovard.com slash blog, and read his books, most especially.
And I really do mean this.
He is my friend, obviously, and whatever, but I really do mean, read Attention Deficit Democracy.
And there is information and knowledge and wisdom in that book that belongs in your brain.
So seriously, run out and get that thing, and keep an eye for the new one that he won't tell us anything about.
Thanks, Jim, very much for your time.
Hey, thanks so much, Scott.
Thanks for the kind words.