03/18/10 – John V. Walsh – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm looking at John V. Walsh's latest article for Antiwar.com.
The panicky eagle, that's you, circles the dragon.
Uh-oh, that sounds like China.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
How about yourself?
I'm doing great.
Hey, listen, our mutual friend Cindy Sheehan was just on the line, and maybe toward the end of this conversation we can talk a little bit about antiwar protesting and so forth like this and that.
But now let's talk about Paul Krugman.
You go ahead.
Well, actually, I'm not the only one to get upset at Paul Krugman.
Surprisingly.
Surprisingly, yeah.
In the Wall Street Journal today, the editorial pretty much agrees.
I mean, this is a first for me with what I said about Krugman.
And they, in an article entitled Yuan's Scapegoat, and subtitled, The U.S. Establishment Flirts with a Currency in Trade War with China, they're very upset with Krugman, too.
And actually, it's not a bad editorial.
And they point out that, really, currencies are not exchanged in a market.
They're controlled by central banks.
And so what is the proper value of a currency, which was the whole point of Krugman's article, is very much up in the air.
So maybe I should take a step back here and explain that Paul Krugman the other day had a column in the New York Times in which he essentially blames China for slowing the recovery from the worldwide recession and calls for a 25% tariff on all Chinese imports.
And I found fault with that on a number of scores.
First of all, the crisis we're trying to recover from was made on Wall Street, not in China.
Secondly, as Paul Craig Roberts points out all the time, many of the imports, as a matter of fact, to the United States from China, as a matter of fact, 60%, are made in American-owned factories there.
So it's our offshoring that's creating a lot of the problems, not my offshoring, the offshoring of the people who have the money to put the factories over there.
And thirdly, China, actually, its stimulus program seems to have done more to pull us out of this big recession than anything else.
So for such a rich country as ours to complain about such a poor country as China is for not doing enough about a recession that we've caused is really incredible.
Actually, they're not just going after China, but of course the second largest exporter in the world after China now is Germany.
Germany used to be number one until a couple of months ago.
And now in the Huffington Post I see they're now talking about China and Germany.
They're calling it Germany, and that apparently both of these countries, with their exports, are responsible for the sad state we in the United States find ourselves in.
Well, I can't buy that.
Our economy is the richest and biggest in the world.
If that economy can't provide what we need in the way of jobs, something's very wrong.
The people in charge are doing something very wrong.
Now, we might differ about what it is, but something is not right.
Yeah, well, and obviously first and foremost, well, maybe second and foremost from whatever it is that ain't right, is the complete lack of self-awareness and willingness on the part of the American state, the American bazillionaires, to take responsibility for their own actions.
I mean, here they want to pick a fight with China.
Here's a question for the war party in America.
You pick a fight with China, who's going to pay for our war on China's western border?
They're the ones paying for our war on their western border, from the long war, they call it, that's going to last from now until forever.
And we're going to, what, pick a fight with these people that hold, what, more than a trillion dollars' worth of our debt?
This is like, you know, they took Rothbard's America's Great Depression, and they're using it as a script on how to make sure to have another one.
Well, actually, that's another thing that, you know, I was in China some months ago, and you have to be very careful about how you consider China.
Certainly it's not dirt poor, and it has the second largest GDP in the world, but that's only a third of ours, roughly, and about the same as Japan's.
They have this huge population, so on a per capita basis, they have, you know, the premier of China recently said that they have 100 years to go before they will catch up with the West.
I don't think that's wrong.
I think on a per capita basis, they have a long way to go.
And what disturbs me a lot is those wars, and is beginning to disturb them, is the wars on the western border, which they seem to think, and I think there's an element of truth to this, in Central Asia, those are directed against containing China, and that is a big mistake.
It's actually quite ironic.
They're paying for the wars that are being used to, quote-unquote, contain them.
That is a big mistake.
Those borders should have trade going across them, not armies.
We're doing a very, very bad thing there.
And the other thing I think about China is, you might be surprised at this, but I feel that the left is very anti-Chinese, and I think there's a feeling that all countries, inevitably, will go through a phase of empire if they get to be, if they rise to a certain level of prosperity and economic, if they climb very high on the economic ladder.
Well, that's a very deterministic view of history that depends only on economics, and I don't think it holds.
And China's history says that there's a good bet that they're not really interested in going out and conquering other lands.
Their history doesn't support that.
They've always been avid traders, but conquerors, even when they could be, they were not.
So it would be a tragedy if, by pushing them, we forced them to build up a military-industrial complex.
Right now they're committed not to go overseas, but they're raising the questions recently.
Gee, the United States seems to be having us in here.
We're worried about getting the oil through the ocean.
Maybe we need to do that.
That's crazy.
We're doing the absolute wrong thing.
Yeah, well, and they're doing the right thing.
You know, if you look at what the Chinese are doing in Africa and even in Afghanistan, they're sending in guys with briefcases to make deals, whereas we send in the Marine Corps.
I mean, if you were an Afghan, who would you rather do business with right now?
I think most people would like to do business with the Chinese, because the other thing about them is they're very long-range view, and they're very stable about things.
And I think they had enough of instability in the 70s.
They're not going to go back to that.
So I think we're making a big mistake, and I was really surprised by the way that Congress, geez, right away, 130 members of Congress sent a letter to, I guess, the Secretary of Treasury or the President calling for sanctions of the same sort Krugman was calling for.
And Krugman turns out to be quite a chauvinist economically.
I mean, I thought in the beginning he was kind of rational, but I'm beginning to doubt it.
Yeah, well, just Google Krugman housing bubble 2002, and you'll see how he encouraged Bush to make one in order to prevent that double-dip recession.
New inflation's got to come in the name of something.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, when you go back and look at the 1930s, you know, probably, at least from my point of view, the best thing that FDR did was repeal Hoover's evil tariff.
The Smoot-Hawley tariff was one of the worst things that Hoover did when he really started the New Deal, being a progressive Northeastern Republican, as he was.
He raised the tariffs and basically shut down international trade.
As the Depression was hitting all over Europe, he started a big trade war.
And, of course, this helped lead to World War II, just in the sense of in the diplomatic relationships between the different front men for the different countries involved.
They all began to mistrust each other even more and look for ways to get advantage over each other even more and whatever.
And it made everybody poorer.
And I thought everybody agreed about that.
That's the thing that gets me is we learned that lesson, right?
You don't put up tariff walls in the middle of a recession.
What?
Yes, I think it's crazy.
Trump says we'll only do it for a while and we'll only do it in select cases.
But, you know, it's a little bit crazy because then everybody, Germany may wonder, you know, gee, are we next?
Because the Huffington Post, this guy in the Huffington Post suggests, yeah, they should be next too.
They should be included because they're doing, actually, it's kind of interesting.
When China overtook Germany as the number one exporter, they declared we're not really number one.
They said Germany is number one.
They said because Germany produces goods that are high quality, high tech, and well branded.
Well, if Germany can do that, why can't the United States do that?
We're much wealthier than they are.
We have an enormous technical and scientific establishment.
What is the problem here?
I mean I can't understand it.
There's a couple of real obvious problems.
The first one is the import-export bank, or export-import bank, whichever it is, and all the Bank for International Settlements and all that, that whole thing is geared toward welfare for American companies that want to leave the country.
So, for example, if you build a factory in, you know, the dark heart of some jungle somewhere in the Indies or something like that and the locals hate your guts and come and burn your factory down, the American taxpayer will bail you out.
Your risk is removed by the federal government.
So there's, you know, and there must be, hell, there was an article, you probably saw this in the New York Times last week about how the American, the U.S. government has subsidized American companies to the tune of billions of dollars specifically for their dealings with the Iranians, who supposedly we have all these sanctions on and are trying to bankrupt and whatever.
And so you have all that corporate welfare that encourages all the offshoring, but you also have inflation.
And like Ron Paul says, if you can print money all day, why would you work?
And if you can get the whole world to accept your phony paper money, because it used to be as good as gold, what, three generations ago or something, then that's what you'll do.
You'll just export depreciating dollars to the world and buy their stuff.
So now how could an American company like Rubbermaid or whatever compete with the Chinese version of the same thing?
You know, when the labor over there is that much cheaper, when the Navy, of course, subsidizes all their security on the high seas, and when the Federal Reserve just keeps the money machine on full blast.
You know, I guess it bothers me, too, that...
I mean, I'm all for international trade, but you're right that it's all out of balance, where we're not making anything because they're making all of our stuff.
Yeah, well, I mean, to some degree, actually, if developing countries want to use low-cost labor to make low-tech items, you know, that really could free us up to make high-tech items.
But when we don't do anything with it, when we don't show that we can do what Germany does, then the opportunity that we have in that exchange is lost.
It seems to me you can't have, I don't know, you can't take advantage of your resources, of your specialties, unless you do something.
You can't just sit there, and I guess that's the problem, that with the offshoring, the people who are in charge of the money sit there and say, well, we've made our money now, and so we don't have to do anything here.
We just get on our jets and fly around.
But also, the demonization that's creeping up in China here, of China, is a very bad thing.
China has its problems.
It has human rights problems.
It has problems of disparity of wealth and income.
It has a long way to go.
But when I see the media begin to demonize the country, I begin to worry where we're headed.
It's exactly the same way with Iran, as a matter of fact.
Iran has problems.
Iran has human rights violations.
But that doesn't threaten me, and that's not a reason for me, or for people that I care about, or for my tax dollars, to go to war with Iran.
And it's very disturbing how many countries in the world is the United States going to demonize and going to say, well, we're going to go in there and set things right.
And I think that's also, you know, with China, with Afghanistan, with Iran, we're going in there, we claim to save women, start up democracy, preserve human rights or establish human rights.
But in the end, it doesn't seem we ever do that.
In the end, it seems we just do a lot of destruction.
And I think, I just wish that the non-interventionist impulse would take stronger hold in this country, but I don't think the elite believe in it at all.
And I think they try to suck us into it with this idea of humanitarian imperialism, that we're going out there to make the world safe for democracy or save womanhood or what have you.
And in the end, it never turns out that way.
Actually, just one more thing.
I was reading this account of the Spanish-American War, which was really our first overseas venture.
And one of the big propaganda items was that they claimed that the Spanish had taken an American woman in Cuba, stripped her naked, and searched her.
And that was all over the papers.
Well, she came back and she said, that never happened.
But too late.
It was, you know, people were stirred up about Anglo-femininity being violated.
And it's an old thing to use this woman, whether you're using it to preserve their virtue or to get them human rights.
Whether you're making the world safe for democracy, that's an old thing too.
These are ploys that are used to suck us into wars, and I think we really have to be careful.
I think that many libertarians would say, you know, this is the do-gooder impulse gone crazy.
Yeah, well, I mean, and especially we can see that in, for example, Obama's war in Afghanistan, where they're deploying battalions of anthropologists and stuff.
This is every community college teacher's dream come true.
We'll go make a society and all this stuff.
But, you know, the thing that gets me about, you know, spreading democracy and helping people and whatever, is just the outright hypocrisy that's embedded right in the very concept.
I mean, you know, you talk about the Spanish-American war, there was all kinds of propaganda about, and a lot of it true, in fact, about what the Spanish were doing to the people of Cuba.
So we had to go and help them by, of course, you know, bringing a bigger war than the one they already had to their island, and then stealing it and taking it and holding on to it for generations of dictators afterwards.
Or going to Christianize the Filipinos, who'd been under Spanish rule and had been Catholic by a super majority for, you know, at least 100 years before that or something.
Although I guess Catholic doesn't count as Christian back in 1896 or whatever.
But then you look at Iraq.
We talked with Darja Mail the other day about the millions of refugees, the million dead, the women who are now slaves, who can be, you know, punished to whichever degree, simply for smiling in public, which is now considered to be criminal behavior by the ayatollahs we've installed in power there.
And, of course, you look at China.
You have, I mean, you've said it already.
Here they're demonizing this place, and the people who live there.
You have people on the left, the union people who don't like China.
You have evangelical Christians who don't like them for their abortion policies and these kinds of things.
Like to pretend that Deng Xiaoping never existed and that it's still some kind of, you know, complete malice, communist dictatorship over there, which it's obviously not.
And meanwhile, so the best interest, I guess, whether it's the left or the right, the best interests of the good billion people of China are priority.
But if it comes to hurting them in order to get our way, then that's perfectly fine, too, just like a million dead Iraqis.
And, of course, you mentioned Iran.
Sorry, I'm just going on now here, too.
But you mentioned Iran.
There is one big difference between Iran and China besides the population, and that is that China actually does have nuclear weapons, thermonuclear weapons, and the delivery systems to get them to Los Angeles or your hometown.
That's why, you know, it's unlikely that, well, we're not going into a full-scale nuclear exchange with China.
That's not going to happen.
But actually, there's a couple of things about, now that I think about the article, a couple of things about China that, one of which I didn't mention in the article, but when Marco Polo went to China a long time ago, served there as an administrator for a couple of decades, when he came back, when he wrote his book about China, in Europe it was first called The Million.
And it was called The Million because it meant there were a million lies in it.
And the Europeans at that time could not believe that there could be such an advanced culture on the other side of the world, at least as advanced.
In some respects, more advanced than European culture at that time.
They couldn't believe that.
This is a part of the world and a very different culture that we still, I think, don't really appreciate.
And the other thing that I did mention in the article is that in 1405, China did send out an exploratory fleet of hundreds of ships, bigger than anything the Columbus would set out on almost a century later.
They went all up and down the east coast of Africa.
They went into the Red Sea.
They explored.
Some people claim they came to the Americas, but I doubt that.
But they went far and wide.
And they had gunpowder.
They had advanced technology.
They did a lot of trading.
But they never conquered anybody.
They never took a slave.
They were not interested in that.
And at the end of 20 years of doing this, or 28 years, whatever it was, they decided, okay, they had seen enough, and it was time to go home.
That is a wonderful impulse.
And it may – so I don't know.
And it comes out of, I think, that China being in Asia, once the Middle Kingdom, so-called, was consolidated thousands of years ago, the whole problem that China had was keeping people out.
It was always a – the whole history is a very defensive history.
And so I think, you know, we ought not to mess with that.
We ought to leave that alone and encourage it and stop threatening them in one way or the other.
And because, as I said before, if we force upon them a powerful navy to protect their oil supplies, and, you know, recently, for example, the Chinese opened – geez, it's last December now – opened this gas pipeline going from the Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan, up through Kazakhstan, over the north where the United States has no military bases, just to take natural gas, which is good for the environment, to China.
And the United States complained.
It wasn't especially well covered in the press, but there were congressional hearings where people were upset and said, what are they doing?
How can they be allowed to do this?
This is outside our control.
Well, that's crazy.
That's just crazy.
Why not let them do it?
Why not?
That's good.
And when people are wealthier, you know, when people are wealthier and have a higher standard of living, their lives are not so short and stunted that they want to easily go off and fight wars, just like in the United States.
We can't have a draft anymore, I don't believe.
I don't think the people will put up with it.
So why don't we say, geez, this is good for us.
Let them go.
Do their thing.
Well, you know, Lou Rockwell had an article, oh, I don't know, a year ago or something, about how far China has come since the days of the Gang of Four and the Great Leap Forward and all this nonsense, where, you know, I guess people argue whether it's, you know, somewhere between 40 and 60 million people were killed by the dictatorship there.
And just in, you know, my lifetime, basically, you've had, I don't know, however many unmeasurable amounts of hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars worth of wealth created in China and the improvement in the standard of living of so many individuals that you could never count them in your life, and that this is wonderful.
And you know what?
Yeah, there is still a Politburo over there.
And you know what?
A lot of things are still wrong with China.
But it was literally the worst place that had ever been before.
And so they're doing well.
And, you know, I think part of this, too, John, is that there's kind of this idea that we're all about to run out of resources of every description any minute now or something, instead of understanding that, you know, this isn't a zero-sum game, that the better the Chinese are doing, the better we can do.
You know, the wealthier they are, then the wealthier trading partners we have, the better off we are.
It's not like every time that a Chinese guy sits down and has a really nice meal, an American doesn't get one or something.
You could make various arguments about it.
Certainly we expanded across the continent, and people have different takes on that.
But I think once we started this overseas empire, which is over a century ago now, we started to go down a very bad road.
And I think it's going to be hard for us to pull back from that.
But we do have this huge military-industrial complex.
Actually, we were cutting it.
Under Bush I, we were cutting it.
And I don't know what happened with Clinton and Bush II and now Obama, but we did head in the right direction then.
You know, I ran for Congress in the early 1990s at the end of the Cold War, and I used to talk about cutting the defense budget in half.
Nobody batted an eyelash at that.
That's a good idea.
My opponents stayed away from the topic because people seemed to agree with that.
We don't even talk about that anymore.
That's off the table.
Even Jean Kirkpatrick, the famous neoconservative, former ambassador to the United Nations, she said, oh great, now we can go back to being a normal country in a normal time.
Right.
Can you imagine?
And then they went to Iraq.
And then they told Saddam, go ahead and invade Kuwait, we don't mind.
Hey, listen, speaking of that, though, check out this from thinkprogress.org, the Center for American Progress, neoliberal, cruise missile, pro-war mongers.
They've got a good blog, though.
And this one is pointing out an article by three Air Force strategists and scholars, apparently pretty high-level guys.
It's at au.af.mil.
And they're saying that the United States should cut its nuclear arsenal by more than 90%, John, that we should be down to 311 nuclear weapons from the current 5,000.
And basically from this blog entry here, I haven't gotten a chance to read the thing yet, but apparently the logic goes like this.
No matter what, we'll always still be able to nuke Moscow.
And as long as we can nuke Moscow, they're not going to nuke us.
So we don't even have to have an agreement with the Russians.
We should unilaterally reduce our nuclear stockpile to 311.
As long as we can nuke Beijing, as long as we can nuke Moscow, Paris, nobody's ever going to start a war with us.
Well, you know, not only would that be good for us in so many ways, but I think it would enhance the reputation of the United States and the world enormously.
And it would be a deserved enhancement.
So we're on the wrong road, and the one thing that I hope, and I think you did a program on this, I hope that this idea of a right-left coalition against empire, and the words of, who used it first?
I guess Martin Luther King, come home, America.
Right now, I see that as our best hope, because we have to stop quarreling with one another about this important issue because we disagree on other issues.
I think at least it's something new.
We ought to try it again.
It was the first response to the initial move of empire abroad in the Spanish-American War.
It's really quite interesting that at that time, one of the major anti-imperial forces was Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was the richest man in America, and he didn't like it.
And so if Andrew Carnegie could work at the time with union leaders to stop the development of empire, we should be able to do that these days.
That's a hope.
Especially when it seems like the whole left-right divide is just silly now in the face of the obvious real divide, which is the bazillionaires, which has got to be a very few people to have that much money, versus all of the rest of us.
That means if you've got, I don't know, $100 million, you're on my side of the class war here.
It's the people with the very most power, I don't know, .01% or something, versus all the rest of us.
They're the imperialists, not the American people.
They're the ones who are for taking trillions of dollars of our taxpayer money for their big banks and their Lockheeds and Northrop Grummans, not us.
And it seems like the divide ought to be pretty easy to define, and the realignment ought to be, it ought to take the snap of a finger.
Come on, it's us versus them.
The people without the power versus the people with the power.
And we want to end to the empire, and we want our Bill of Rights back.
Let's just start with that.
It shouldn't be that hard at all.
It doesn't seem like it to me.
I have to leave.
All right.
Well, I have to kick you off.
But thanks very much for joining me on the show, John.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me, and keep up the good work.
It's great.
Thanks.
I really appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's John V. Walsh.
He's a scientist in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And you can find his most recent article for antiwar.com at original.antiwar.com slash John V. Walsh.
Throw some dashes in between that middle initial there.
The panicky eagle circles the dragon.
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