03/19/10 – Jon Basil Utley – 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 happy to welcome back to the show.
My friend, John Basil Utley, he writes for us at Antiwar.com.
You can find them at, uh, let's see here.
Antiwar.com slash Utley.
And then I think probably the new ones you'll have to put original dot antiwar.com slash welcome back to the show.
John, how are you doing?
Well, fine, Scott.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show.
Uh, I want to ask you something.
Boy, it just shocked me the other, uh, minute ago.
Uh, I was scanning through my links here and I hit refresh on Glenn Greenwald's page.
And he has a quote here from Glenn Reynolds, who, as I'm sure you know, is, uh, one of the leaders in the conservative movement nowadays.
Um, and he says, if I were the Israelis, not only would I bomb Iran, but I do so in such a way as to create as much trouble for China, Russia, Europe, and the United States as possible.
So I guess my question for you is why does Glenn Reynolds hate freedom and America so much that he would want Israel to bomb Iran in such a way as to create as much trouble for the United States as possible?
You know, to stand it on its head, these people are not necessarily friends of Israel, as we know from the religious fundamentalists in America, the, we call them Armageddonites.
They're all supportive of Israel because Israel is part of God's plan to destroy the world.
And incidentally, God will then kill Jews who don't convert to Christianity.
I mean, these are, what kind of friends are these?
I wrote once the strangest alliance in history.
It's on the internet, strangest alliance about the Israeli hard line.
They could combine with the Christian fundamentalists, evangelical Israel, first ones here.
It's not, and so, you know, there's this intellectual disease too, that, you might say intellectuals of that class should not be running the government ever.
The whole, you can't conceive of the crash to the whole world economy.
And people who want that have other motives perhaps, or they have unhappy personal lives, you know, or maybe they think they'll get to heaven sooner.
You know, it's not worth taking seriously, I don't think.
Well, the only reason to take it seriously is because, you know, Glenn Reynolds has a pretty powerful voice out there in the blogosphere.
And as I'm sure you're well aware, all this past week over at commentary and the Weekly Standard, the Washington Post editorial board, the National Review, everybody's taken Benjamin Netanyahu's side over Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
You see who they are.
I might add that that's not, I believe, the majority of American Jews who would like to see peace and don't, especially younger, younger Jews don't feel like this bitterness of many old, old people.
And it's no help.
I mean, let me add another factor, particularly on the right wing.
There's tremendous ignorance about the outside world.
I go to meetings regularly in Washington of the Paul, Paul Wyrick group and the Grover Norquist group.
And I'm involved with all sorts of conservative groups from my old anti-communist days.
And I am almost the only one who speaks foreign languages, who lived and did business in the third world.
I joke when I was in business, we couldn't use bombs and bribes.
The American government's main use, main tools, we had to sell and convince people.
And part of all this is if you look at their backgrounds, these people know almost nothing about the outside world.
And another side of that is American international business has almost no contact with the right wing Republican, particularly social conservatives, who are.
And let me add on this.
I go to other meetings where they're panicked by the Muslims are spreading Sharia law.
You know, that's where they cut off your hand for stealing something.
And there and you can't get interest on your bank account.
The Muslims are spreading Sharia law all over Europe and they'll come here and they'll devour us and destroy us.
And again, it's people who know almost nothing about the outside world.
And they do a lot of damage.
And they were very heavy in the Bush administration.
And thank God they were defeated.
Obama's doing his problems, but he's not part of that.
And I might add the two two Jewish leaders in Obama's administration are were criticized by Netanyahu as being self-hating Jews because they won't put Israel first.
As as most American Jews don't.
Right.
Well, Rahm Emanuel is even a veteran of the IDF.
Well, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod were called self-hating Jews by Netanyahu because they wouldn't put Israel first above America.
This is the kind of Netanyahu is is he's the one that you call a fascist, that it's Blut und Boden is the old German expression, blood and soil.
And that's what those people, the Likud, are in Israel.
Well, you're certainly right about the neoconservative movement in America not representing most American Jews.
The polls show that most American Jews are liberal Democrats by, I think, super majority.
They voted that way, and it's very influential with these Republicans, I would say, know nothing conservatives who are who the main thing they know nothing of the outside world.
Yeah.
Well, and I saw a headline, I guess I didn't look too far into this, but over the controversy of the last week with Joe Biden's humiliation and all that, apparently J Street has got a surge of funding and response.
OK, I hadn't heard that.
People really would rather prefer a non-Likud, Nick, Israel lobby in America.
I mean, and these people, you know, it's it's it's very sad for America.
And they remember they are only powerful because of the alliance they get from some of the particularly the hard right.
I don't want to say social conservative because the many, of course, are not.
That's too broad a brush.
But the old man on the religious right, I guess, is the way you put it.
And that was, you know, what's his name?
The one who died from Virginia.
Anyway, they had denounced her.
Rabin Rabin, the Israeli premier, was murdered by Jewish extremists for being he was killed because he was blocking God's plan to to bring about Armageddon.
Oh, Jerry Falwell.
Yeah, I follow because Rabin was trying to make peace.
He was working against God, what God wanted.
Right.
I mean, what kind of nuts do we have here?
In fact, I think Mearsheimer and Walt in their original paper on the Israel lobby, they talk about how after September 11th, Colin Powell apparently was at least slightly successful in getting George Bush's ear and saying, listen, now is our chance.
We have all the political capital in the world.
We could possibly need to solve this Israeli Palestinian crisis, which is driving our terrorism problem.
And, you know, we've got to do this.
And apparently Bush went for it, at least at first.
But then Tom DeLay came knocking and Tom DeLay said, listen, I represent the Cornerstone Church and the rest of them, too.
And if you start putting pressure on Sharon rather than doing whatever he says, then you're going to have a problem on the right, Mr.
President.
I didn't know that, but I well believe it.
Tom DeLay was one who was filmed at the meeting of the Christians United for Israel, one of the Armageddon people.
And he was filmed there saying, I live for the end time.
It's on video.
I mean, right.
Max Blumenthal got that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, this is let's talk about something serious, you know, these people are so.
Well, this ties in and, you know, I'm sorry, because I always ask you about this, but it's so interesting to me that you studied under Carol Quigley at Georgetown University, the famous author of the Anglo-American Establishment and Tragedy and Hope, a history of the world in our time.
And one of the things that's while there's so many different things about Quigley that are important, but one of the things that I learned from reading Tragedy and Hope was his the way he tells the story, the cycles of civilizations.
And he says that the West has been able to reinvent itself and stay the West and be able to go through all the cycles that set the last ones, the last steps on the cycle over and over and over again.
So what was Greek culture became Roman culture, became Christendom, became, you know, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and the scientific all this and that.
And but we're still the West.
But he says, when you go back and you trace all the civilizations throughout history, most of them are not so lucky to be able to reinvent themselves.
Most of them go through the cycles and eventually end with, you know, basically murder, suicide.
And what Quigley's term for that last stage of a civilization before it completely destroys itself is called world empire.
Like in your website, Americans Against World Empire.
Well, I and I took that topic of our website from his lectures, and that was the thing.
Let me just clarify that civilizations grow through a great expansion, a stage of expansion, a stage of conflict, and then world or universal empire.
And that came, for example, Rome, et cetera.
And the point was that once you go into universal empire, people think that they are on top.
But actually, it's masking the decline of the civilization, as you can if you know your Roman people who know their Roman Empire.
And the point was, in the stages of conflict, you can get back to create to growth and creation and expansion in a healthy state or you go into the empire stage.
And this fits very much today because a lot of people, especially these ones on the right you were talking about, think of the empire as a great success of America.
And it's not.
It's becoming an empire.
It means losing our liberties at home.
It means more and more taxation, more and more debt.
This is all the Roman Empire.
The taxes were so high that the Romans, the people in Roman Empire eventually welcomed the barbarian invasions to get away from the Roman tax collector.
And we see in our own society this vast increase in government spending.
And I put it another way.
Warfare and welfare go together.
And the people on the right, many want to cut welfare.
But you never hear a word about cutting the waste in the warfare.
And that's where they go together.
Because if you spend a trillion dollars on a war, an unnecessary war in Iraq, what's how can people argue against spending a hundred billion or billions and billions on some welfare in America?
And of course, Bush did that for his second campaign.
He decided that way they couldn't win unless they had more welfare in America.
So they pushed the Medicare expansion.
And so I think the real important subject.
Yeah, well, what's important there to me is, well, it's the bubble, the empire bubble, in a sense, as you say, it seems, you know, a generation can go by.
Right.
It's been a generation since the end of the Cold War, for example.
We've had a generation where it looks like America is getting more and more powerful and all this.
But really what's happened is our government has extended its ability to export our phony paper money.
And so at the same time and piled up all this debt.
So at the same time, everybody's got a nice new flat screen TV and SUV and things look fine.
What's really happened is they've sold our country out from under us.
We've we've actually completely weakened our ability to produce anything and take care of ourselves.
Let me let me say slightly on that.
I don't think it becomes you can say what you're saying and then get into trade protectionism.
And that's not really the point.
If we are producing things and we produce all sorts of high tech stuff.
And in terms of exports, one movie Avatar brings in hundreds and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of money into the U.S. from from that's an export to the point is that you are destroying.
Well, no, we have we have in the high tech area vast amounts of it.
If you look at the figures, we still export a great deal.
But the destruction of our industry, partly, let's say it's not because of Chinese imports.
It's because of what we do to the companies ourselves.
And you've got the biggest issue right now, health care.
It's health care is such a burden that General Motors used to spend eight thousand dollars.
And this was what years back on every worker for health insurance.
And in Canada, they spent eight hundred.
That's why plants would go overseas, the tremendous burdens that are put on American industry by us ourselves.
Our guys can compete, but not when they're loaded down with this kind of stuff.
Well, and I certainly am not for protectionism at all.
I'm not completely open trade, but people more and more people are.
And they think that's an answer.
Let me add also these 10 years of fighting, knocking our heads against these Muslim crazies, if you will.
Many of them.
China is building a highway network more expansive than the United States.
They are building super highways everywhere.
Ours are breaking down.
Bridges are collapsing.
We have to we need tremendous expenditures in the U.S. to rebuild some of our infrastructure.
These 10 years while we bat our heads and spent a trillion or trillions of dollars, China is building itself a tremendous modern country.
No, that that's the way to look at it.
Yeah.
Well, and on the outsourcing thing, I guess I'd like to mention because this is, I think, part of that bubble of world empire that we look the strongest as we're kind of lashing out, taking as much as we can from other places and running up massive debt.
And I guess I'd kind of like to frame it like this, where if you have, I don't know, however many vacuum cleaner companies and Rubbermaid and whatever different kind of industrial factory type economy in America, there's a certain degree to which, you know, all things being equal in a free market or even taking into account, like you say, health care costs or something like that, where some of these industries are going to go ahead and move to China or to Mexico or somewhere else where labor is cheaper.
However, you know, all things being equal, they can only do so much of that without laying off so many Americans that nobody's left with any money to buy the stuff they're trying to sell.
Right.
So they don't want all their workers in America to be so poor that we can't buy any of their stuff that they're making in China.
So there's a on the price sheet, on the balance sheet, there's a certain level where you'd only outsource so much, but not too much.
But one of the things that's happened with this giant bubble, when everybody can get a giant new SUV and a flat screen TV on credit at zero percent and all this craziness is what happens is we end up outsourcing.
It's not all things are equal at all.
We end up outsourcing far more than we would have.
So then the people are left, you know, with massive unemployment, massive downward pressure on wages.
And that's going to stay for another 15, 20 years at the rate we're going.
It still isn't like there's another factor that is if you take a Nike sneakers or take the Apple iPhone, we think those are made overseas in Asia.
But the sneaker, the tennis shoes, they're called sneakers in my day, a tennis shoe, if it retails for seventy five dollars, probably three or four dollars of that cost goes to the manufacturer in China.
Most of the money is going to advertising, to administration here, profits here.
And this applies to the Apple iPhone, too.
The fact they just they have all the we have the ownership of the technical of the patents, all that stuff, most of that money is coming a lot of it into service industries in the United States.
Just advertising is a major chunk of the money you pay for sneakers.
The same with the iPhone.
So it's not quite as simple as to say, well, it's their building factories, you know, the way you put it.
There's also a factor that we provide services and tremendous amounts of this money are actually still come to the US and or in China.
Many of these factories, of course, are American owned, etc.
But it's it's it appears the way what you're saying.
But I think one should bear in mind those those facts.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing that Quigley talked about, let's see, I think this was in Tragedy and Hope back in 1966 was he basically excoriated and attacked the Barry Goldwater right.
And the you know, he said that the way elections are supposed to work is the primaries are supposed to get rid of the right winger and settle on the most moderate candidate to run in the general election.
And that system broke down this time.
And the extremists got the nomination because it was written in 66.
Right.
So he's talking about that's the gerrymandering of congressional districts.
Yeah.
Well, what he was worried about, though, I think was that he trusted the old eastern establishment to keep things on an even keel.
But he didn't trust the wisdom of the military industrial complex and the what became, I guess, the Ronald Reagan right to be smart enough to keep us on this side of Republican world empire and and prevent that self-destruction.
Yeah.
And the point's very valid for his day.
But the big change today is the gerrymandering, which means that each congressional district is is sending someone who represents the most extreme people in the area, whether it's on the left or the right.
And the side of that, that is what is wrecking him at Washington and why Washington is no longer able to do insensible reforms.
You've got that.
And we have a Congress today that is almost like the old communist ones.
People who are running get reelected like 98 percent of the time in the House of Representatives.
The Senate is more democratic because it represents the whole state.
But in the House of Representatives, it's like a 98 percent reelection rate for people who are running unless they retire.
And their only threat is in their primaries, which usually is from an extreme on the left or right.
And that's why the American system is breaking down, I would argue, is because the gerrymandering means they no longer represent the moderate, more moderate people.
But then again, you know, the more centrist, more centrist candidates or congressmen, senators are the worst ones, like Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Joe Lieberman.
Right.
The liberal Republicans and the conservative Democrats.
Lieberman was a far leftist.
He was just loved by the War Party because he was pro-World War.
They were the religious right in America.
Sacrificed everything.
That's a typical case of religious right.
He was so anxious for the war that they forgave Lieberman all his leftist abortion and whatnot.
All those issues were subsided.
You know, it was more important to have a Democrat who supported the war.
Yeah.
Well, I'm just saying it's kind of ironic to me that even looking back at the election of 64, you know, Nelson Rockefeller was supposedly the moderate and it was the Rockefellers who pushed the world empire more than any other family in this country.
So all Quigley was mad about was that a bunch of people who didn't make the empire were going to inherit and run it into the rocks.
Well, you know, Scott, all these Quigley did right.
I mean, I was in his class 50 years, 60 years ago, 50 years ago.
I mean, so he's right on the big scheme of things.
The particular aspects in America.
Yeah.
I say the gerrymandering changed, changed at all.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
Although I think I've read recently, aren't there efforts in a couple of states to redo the the districts in a more.
Yeah, very much of their efforts.
But it was, you know, the Supreme Court knocked down the term limit.
I mean, the other way to approach this is term limits to get rid of these people that no one should be in that long with a good point, maybe 12 years, you know.
But they.
Something has to be done about this because the Congress less and less representative of America and it's impossible for people, the more moderate people on both sides to to work out some compromise.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that's how the nuts, you know, the guy when you started the program, a guy who says it doesn't matter if the whole world economy goes to hell, which it might.
The risk of Israel attacking Iran is that the state subordinates get closed.
Insurance rates go through the roof.
Oil stops.
Let me add another point on the trade deficit, though.
When you were talking about losing jobs and all, there's a tremendous area of oil, oil and gas here in America.
If we didn't have the vast deficit buying oil from Saudi Arabia and from the Arabs, we we don't need to do that.
We have energy in this country, which has been blocked by the extreme environmentalist and again, by the Congress that dysfunction is dysfunctional.
We have now the new discoveries of natural gas, the fracturing, new ways of producing it and shale rock.
We have 100, 200 years supply of this and it's less.
It's 30 percent of the price of oil.
We could have an abundance of energy.
And instead of that, Obama can't bring himself to talk about gas and natural gas and energy.
And they want to they spend billions on this solar energy cost six to eight times as much as gas or coal.
And the we could be producing and you have to add offshore oil exploration.
The governor of Virginia is trying to get the Department of Interior that to allow Virginia to drill offshore.
And this is an environmentalist extreme.
That's Obama's people.
We put in and then nuclear power.
Obama talks about sending billions to subsidize new nuclear power.
He invite in his hands in his administration.
It takes four or five years just to get the permission to build a nuclear plant.
That's all in the administrative process that he could put things to streamline it.
They are not just say you're guaranteeing billions.
It takes 10 years to build a nuclear plant.
China and India build them in three years.
We are sitting with our hands tied and not that.
That's why the trade deficit is part of that, because we have to import oil.
These are all things that we do to ourselves.
It's not what the foreigners do to us.
It's us.
Well, and that's part of having a government that's so big that every question comes down to whatever Congress or the president decides is nothing is really up to the American people at all anymore.
It's all about political football.
Yes, totally.
All right.
Well, so let's talk about a way to fix this.
There's a move on begun by Kevin Zeese from voters for peace.
The point is they're trying to make a new anti-imperialist league or an anti-empire league.
Some people don't like the word imperialist.
But anyway, it's an attempt to really realign around the question of bringing our troops home and reinstating our Bill of Rights.
Those are the issues.
And, you know, maybe I'm not sure if, you know, anti bailout position is part of that or not.
Maybe it's just limited to to the Bill of Rights and the troops home.
But it seems to me like the populist right and the populist left and everybody who's not a shareholder in Goldman Sachs ought to be able to join together.
And that includes, you know, the kinds of people that you meet with at your Republican meetings in D.C.
There every week and and all the rest of us, too.
Seems like if you're not a billionaire, maybe even some of the billionaires, if they're not in the war industries, everybody ought to be coming together to support an anti-empire league of left, right, all religions, all classes and races and everything, you know, for the Bill of Rights and against world empire.
Do you think we can do it?
Well, there was a meeting actually a few weeks ago in Washington trying to bring right and left together to have a big conference in the fall doing some of this.
And in practice, I heard at this meeting, it was the left started fighting each other.
And that's traditional with the left.
And it didn't nothing much came of it.
And and then you have I've written about this for foreign policy and focus left, right alliance.
And in fact, on the Internet, aptly my name, you tell me why left, right will come up and the extremes on both sides when they get into these meetings, they start promoting their view.
And then that pushes off the moderates on both sides and they all split up.
And it's I'm not sure that at least I work more on the right, trying to bring some, I would say, reexamining of the cost of the wars and stuff.
And I must say, in my meetings, nobody wants to cut a nickel from the defense budget, which is a source of tremendous waste.
You know, they they buy planes like the F-22 and they start producing them before they've tested them.
And the purpose of that is to be sure that the contract goes through and to get jobs in the congressional districts and to make more money.
And it makes more money for the defense manufacturers, because when any change in a contract, they can charge what they want.
And even though there was a fixed contract at the beginning price, they start and the F-35, I might add, is all cost plus so far, the new fighter planes.
And that's the the waste in the defense thing.
And then, of course, you don't call it waste paying, paying the young men who in combat are good salaries.
A second lieutenant, friend of mine, Sergeant of the Marine Corps, is forty five thousand dollars a year, plus, of course, food and room and board and all the benefits.
But we can't afford this.
Our soldiers, you can't send the educated people that we send overseas.
It's the cost is unfathomable with Obama's extend more, sending more troops to Afghanistan.
It came out to like a million dollars per man when you add everything in per the cost per year of putting a man there.
I mean, I mean, the costs are unbelievable.
And with enough money and manpower, we could change Afghanistan, perhaps, and have girls going to school and protect them and and all the rest and maybe have some democracy.
But we can't afford it, as you were saying, by having this anti-empire thing.
But I think you have to look in Washington where I live.
War, war is tremendously profitable.
And I wrote recently an article called Sun Tzu and America's Way of War.
Sun Tzu, the Chinese classical expert on warfare.
And one of his his points is, is that the most successful generals win without firing a shot or pulling a sword, if you will.
In those days, you want to win without going to war and to combat and other points.
But the American thing is war is very profitable.
So we fight where most of human history soldiers would go to fight in order to loot and rape, if you will.
That's what most of wars were for thousands and thousands of years.
And we've come away from that, thank God.
But but since the First World War, we've gone to teach democracy.
But our wars have changed.
Wars are very costly for us, for the government and very profitable for various interests at home.
Well, I mean, that's really the key is, well, lots of keys there.
The but the money for the military industrial complex, the military Keynesianism, as Bob Higgs and Chalmers Johnson call it.
In fact, Chalmers Johnson went and showed how I forgot which be something or other bomber it was that every single congressional district in America had one little piece of the plane, at least being assembled in that in their district.
So every single congressman had a particular interest in supporting it.
And as you say, it's very profitable for some.
It's at the expense of the rest of us.
It's simple broken window fallacy stuff.
You take a bunch of money and make a bomb out of it and then destroy property with it.
This is a net loss, period.
There is no the profit is for some at the expense of others, particularly Iraqis and Afghans and Pakistanis.
But now.
So is there no hope on the right other than the kids?
I mean, when you go and meet with Y.
Rick and Norquist and all these guys, can't they remember that in the 1990s, they sort of kind of agreed with Pat Buchanan about empire, at least a little bit that they were against Clinton's wars in the Balkans and that you really can't be a limited constitutional republic with a balanced budget and have a world empire at the same time?
I mean, come on, Norquist is smart enough to know that.
No, Norquist very much agrees with that.
Yeah.
Well, what about the rest of these guys?
Well, and and even Paul Wyrick did.
But they can't come.
You can't get too far ahead of your flock.
Yeah.
Or you get eaten by wolves, you know.
And the point in Washington, I see the military budget for military industrial complex, tremendous money goes out to so many groups and or they hope one day to work for them.
And this and that is all in the money.
And so very few people will come out in these meetings.
I am the only one who ever says to cut some of the defense budget.
Nobody on the right wing I've ever heard even say that.
So and going into the waste and the budget, I mean, you do have the libertarians like Robert Higgs has written some great stuff on the defense at the Independent Institute.
And he comes up with a trillion dollars, the actual defense budget when you put in the Department of Energy and the Homeland Security and all the hidden stuff is actually a trillion, not the six or seven hundred billion.
They say, right.
So it is I mean, this is a libertarian thing.
More the conservatives are pretty tied into it, really.
Yeah.
But these programs, the work you do, the word does get out.
And and actually we're going bankrupt.
So it is going to happen.
Even the defense budget will be cut because we are going bankrupt as a nation.
Right.
This is why world empire is the last stage in a civilization is because you end up with paper money.
Hey, just like in Sun Tzu's China back in the day and then collapse.
I mean, that's really and and, you know, I don't know the time frame.
I guess Ron Paul says, give it a couple of years outside.
And he figures that dollars will be worthless.
Well, I mean, they keep going down.
I remember when a candy bar cost a nickel when I was a kid.
I can remember literally that was.
But yes, I mean, but you add to that some of the recent things.
Of course, now the health care bill is a tremendous new expense and burden on our companies, I might add.
But either way, if we can go on borrowing the money from China to have all our deficits, in the end, we still have to pay the paper, you know.
And sooner or what you don't know is one day that the people you were quoting is that suddenly interest rates skyrocket.
But for example, when we have a trillion dollar deficit, the government is only paying maybe one percent to borrow that money.
If you see them, the low rate on short term government borrowings is like one or one percent.
If those rates went up to, say, four percent, you'd suddenly have a tremendous increase to our deficit.
Right.
The trillions of dollars of deficit is.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, and the debt now is twelve trillion and they're going they're adding to it at about one point seven per year or something.
Well, twelve trillion, what is one percent is a year is one hundred twenty billion.
Is that my right?
If I have to guess more, I play well.
But in any case, we're paying we're paying right now four hundred something billion or five hundred billion a year.
Well, some of it we're paying higher interest rates because it's longer term money.
OK, there you go.
But the the point is that the if the dollar goes, suddenly the government is going to be have to paying to renew its debt.
Because it rolls over maybe four or five percent interest.
That alone would skyrocket the budget deficits by by a trillion dollars or something.
Another trillion.
I mean, we're on the edge now, but you don't know when you're on the edge, when you're going to fall over.
You may continue a while.
Well, yeah, you know, that's one thing that Charles Goyette told me is after a lifetime of understanding Austrian economics and watching the bubbles come and go and rise and pop and and all the recessions and business cycles that the bubble always lasts longer than you think it's going to.
And then the fall is always further than you think, too.
So it could be the same thing for the empire bubble itself, you know?
Well, and of course, the biggest variable expense is the empire.
As I said earlier in the program, when you pay for warfare, a trillion, how can you deny billions, hundreds of billions more for welfare?
Because especially an unnecessary war, you know, and then we're told again, I'm on the right wing.
We're told there are various people terrifying our many of our people that the Muslims out there going to destroy us.
They're going to take over.
Sharia law is going to take over.
You can't believe some of the naivety I see on the right.
Yeah, about this.
And I might add, just in terms of these things, Glenn Beck, who's now a spokesman, if you will, for many, many on the right.
He's not a pro war man.
And I heard him say he believes more the libertarian views on the war.
You don't hear him promoting to attack Iran and all that stuff.
Well, maybe not anymore.
I mean, he was he made his millions being the worst warmonger in America for years.
OK, maybe he said he's changed.
Well, I mean, and that's fine, because I guess, you know, his audience are the naive that you speak of there.
And if he can get them to flip on a dime and become peacemongers, right.
Yeah.
I mean, people do learn and he's honest about it.
So I heard him say that on a program that he was coming to the libertarian view on the war.
So he did say he was coming to it.
He didn't say he'd been there.
That's good.
See, I have this thing.
I'm not sure how conservative or liberal or anything this point of view is, John.
But it seems to me like world empire, that's for France and Britain.
That's not that has nothing to do with what America is supposed to be about anyway.
And I guess, you know, it's arbitrary.
Noam Chomsky calls it the water fallacy to say we weren't an empire until McKinley went and conquered the Philippines and Cuba and all that.
Really, it was an empire, you know, all the way to California.
But then again, you know, whatever history is, is nothing but a bunch of blood.
So draw an arbitrary line and and let's go with the water fallacy and say, fine, OK, we conquered North America all the way to the Pacific.
But when it comes to running the world, that's not our job.
The global policeman and all that.
These are the pretensions of old Europe.
And this is a complete corruption of the American ideal, whatever you want to call it.
Many immigrants came here from Europe just to get away from that.
As people have told me, a friend of mine, the French immigration was saving their sons from the war, from the French kings that were constantly going to war and having their children killed.
I mean, there's a young man, young males in the war were killed and saved their sons.
They came to America.
And but we are told, of course, remember, we're not told it's an empire.
We're told they attacked us.
We're defending ourselves.
I don't know how going into Afghanistan.
Well, of course, it wasn't in Iraq.
It had nothing to do with defending ourselves.
But that's the way people are told.
And yeah.
Well, and that's why I always like to focus on the word empire.
And I know, you know, again, we talked about before Americans against world empire.
You adopted that phrase from Carol Quigley as, you know, the the name of the problem, the thing that we're up against.
And it seems like to me, especially for conservatives, getting them to recognize that it isn't just communists who call America an empire, but conservatives call it that, too, because that's what it is.
And the reason they don't want to admit that's what it is, is because they know it's wrong.
They know America is not supposed to be an empire.
America means, you know, guys with wolfskin caps hiding behind rocks, shooting redcoats in the head.
That's what America is about.
Secession from empire, independence from empire, not taking it on.
Of course, that's why they want to pretend that, oh, Sharia law is coming, because otherwise they'd have to admit that they're the ones who started it.
They're the ones who are screwing up.
Exactly, exactly.
And I mean, it's hard to say where it goes.
What you have to look at Obama now, when he won the election on pulling back from the empire, we got, what is it, 800 foreign bases and 800 bases in foreign countries pulling back.
But once he got to Washington and became part of the establishment, he's supporting it.
So it's this tremendous forces in America pushing for the empire wars, etc.
Yeah, well, it's looking more and more, John, like the empire is going to collapse.
It is like Ron Paul says, it's not going to be because you listen to me.
The empire is going to come home because we're going broke and the thing is going to come down.
And I guess what's most important is that, you know, people like you with this, you know, dare I say, moderate and reasonable approach to American policy are heard from so that when we're picking up the pieces, we know what to do.
And instead of, you know, asking for an uber Obama and another new deal, maybe we can try to get back to what we were supposed to be doing in the first place.
Yes.
Yeah, that is John Basil Utley.
He is one of the last nights of true conservatism in America.
CPAC and the wars is his most recent article at original.antiwar.com slash Utley.
And check out the site Americans Against Bombing, Americans Against World Empire at Iraqwar.org.
Thanks again.
My full name on the Internet and you let me add the last article, you mentioned the CPAC meeting of the young of the conservatives in Washington.
The first time that Ron Paul spoke and he got thunderous applause.
And it's the first time they've really heard those arguments.
And the younger people who are heavy, the majority, they're very supportive.
And there are many people with us on this.
And the CPAC, it was really the first time, as I say, that this position was really presented.
And Ron Paul won the straw vote.
Yeah, so that shows what we can gather our ideas across.
Well, and it also, you know, there was news yesterday that despite what probably many of us would see as some pretty major shortcomings, Dick Cheney and the core of the War Party, I mean, Bill Kristol and Dick's daughter, Liz, and Mark Thiessen, the latest star in the pro-torture circuit, have designated Rand Paul, Ron Paul's son, running for Senate in Kentucky as the enemy.
He is not one of us.
He must be stopped.
We must support his opponent, Trey Grayson, and that's coming out of Dick Cheney headquarters there, according to Politico.
Well, I mean, so I guess that shows that, you know, as George Bush used to say, it's hard work, but we're making progress here, John.
Absolutely.
Your work, too, I might add, obviously.
Well, I like to think so.
Thanks.
Thank you.
OK.
All right.
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