All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our first guest on the show today is John Basil Utley.
He is associate publisher of the American conservative magazine.
He was a foreign correspondent in South America for the journal of commerce and Knight Ritter newspapers.
Uh, I think it was on voice of America for a long time too, right?
Uh, former associate editor of the times of the Americas.
He's a writer and advisor for antiwar.com and edits the blog, the military industrial congressional complex, uh, that's at Iraq war.org.
And then I think also against bombing.org, uh, Americans against world empire.
Uh, and that kind of stuff.
The latest one is polling the right questions on defense voters.
Get it right.
Huh?
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you?
Well, thank you, Scott.
Fine.
Glad to be back.
Good.
Good.
Uh, it's been way too long since we've talked.
Um, wow.
What an optimistic title to read it.
Antiwar.com voters getting something right.
And in talking about foreign policy really do tell what democracy does work.
It just takes time.
And, um, most people, I, I used to be a salesman long ago.
And what I, what I learned from that was that most people are intelligent, but they're not informed.
Um, most people are ignorant on, on, they can't know everything.
But, uh, most people are pretty smart when they have the facts before them.
And that's why I think polling, what's interesting in this article is you wonder how come the other polls don't ask these kinds of questions, right?
Well, it's all in the question, isn't it?
It all comes down to the premise of the question.
Most, you know, Ron Paul, there's another article I wrote, the militarism budget.
And Ron Paul had said, uh, we shouldn't call it defense budget.
It should be called militarism.
And I suggested we should hyphenate it to defense militarism budget.
And, uh, it's all in the name of half the budget he figured was for, uh, aggression, aggression overseas, et cetera, was half went to defense as a rule of thumb.
You could say that.
All right now.
So you're talking about this brand new book by Scott Rasmussen, the pollster.
It's called the people's money.
What the American people think about how the government's spending our money, I guess.
Well, there you go.
The people, they don't have much.
They, the big thing one gets from the book is how different the establishment is in Washington from what most Americans want.
That it's really become very separate and many issues that people in the polling indicate that don't show in the, for example, the news, the daily news.
One of the poll results, 82% of Americans believe that economic threat is the greatest, is greater than the military threat to America.
Namely what we're doing to ourselves was always been London success was causing us to do all these stupid things ourselves and the damage we've done to ourselves.
So that doesn't reflect Washington or most of the news and, uh, things, things like that, that, that, um, it just, uh, uh, another of his points, for example, is we, the United States has committed to defend 56 nations.
If any, there's any border dispute or whatever it is we have signed with NATO and other, other contracts, other treaties to defend 56 nations.
But in his polling, there was only four nations that got over 60% support from America.
That was Canada, England, Australia, and Israel are the ones that we would fight for, go to war for.
And then there's the NATO.
There's some others that are over 50, barely over 50%.
Uh, South Korea is 59%, but that's only a few in total.
There's 12 countries, but we are committed to defend 56 countries.
Uh, and you know, the, the madness of the money, uh, you mentioned we run a website called, um, military industrial Congress complex, and that's what Eisenhower originally called it, but it's too long.
The Congress complex, it comes up on Google then.
And, uh, the, the point about the money, it's just unbelievable the way we, this country throws it away.
You know, one, each soldier in Afghanistan is costing a million dollars when you add everything.
His, his replacement, his retirement, his education, his hospitalization, if they're wounded, God knows, and so on.
It's just, you can't believe all this.
Right.
Well, now, um, it's interesting, you know, I wonder when you talk about the disparity, I obviously I haven't read this book by Scott Rasmussen, but I remember the Pew poll from 2009 where they, uh, I think they quit asking these questions after the results they got in 2009, where the American people were by, I think a super majority convinced that we ought to just let other nations in the world go their own way and worry about taking care of ourselves, which of course the, the Pew trust termed isolationism in the worst kind of square quotes.
But in that same survey, they also surveyed the membership of the council on foreign relations, which is about 3,500 or 4,000 of the most influential people in America.
And they all said that empire's wonderful.
And the disparity in the numbers on every single answer was just incredible.
It was, you know, by, by tens and tens of points.
Yeah.
The point for the, what Rasmussen in his book called the political class is that it's fun running around the world and deciding this and sending troops and ships over here and there and imagining one's running the world is, is a great stimulus.
It's exciting.
But I would argue the main point is that America is incapable of running the world.
That there could be an argument if we were capable that most of the world wants to have the prosperity we have, they want freedom.
Uh, if, if it was possible that we could spread our way by military force, what we try to do, and then occupying these countries, we know now that it's totally impossible when you, if you know, Iraq, and I mean, your listeners do, but Iraq and Afghanistan, the mistakes we made, the agencies, the stupidities going into Iraq and firing all the civil servants, the whole government staff, every civil servant, every teacher was fired.
Uh, of course, all the military was dismissed, all the police dismissed.
And then we wonder why the country's in chaos in, in Afghanistan.
You see, we're going there.
How do we occupy and succeed when we can't trust the police and army we train?
They hate us so much that their, their great thing is to shoot just a couple of Americans, the soldiers and police do it to us.
So how can we go in and work, manage these countries if we're afraid of their own police and army killing, killing Americans?
It's just impossible.
And another factor I might add, these countries, especially Afghanistan, every Afghan who works with Americans is told by the Taliban, when the Americans leave, you're going to be killed.
And so most people are afraid to work with us or they're, they're double agent, you know, with the Taliban.
It's just so impossible, the whole thing that we can't, we shouldn't go in in the first place.
That's the answer.
And that's what these polling results results say.
Uh, another interesting statistic here was that, uh, I think it's only 15 or 20% believe that Americans troops should be stationed overseas even, uh, except in, or should go overseas except for vital American national interest, uh, et cetera.
You know, you, you talk about these things often.
Well, you know, I guess I just am never under the impression that so many people agree with me.
Um, I guess, you know, one thing is, I guess I kind of think John that they agree with us, but they mostly don't care that much about it is the problem, right?
Well, I, I wouldn't quite say that the system is so rigged that they give up.
They do care.
They're, they agree with us.
They do care.
But after they vote, as the author also says, always they vote for people to cut taxes and cut regulations often, but it always is a wasted vote.
So after they do this with both parties, I might add, after they do this a few times, they find, even when they vote, the guys they vote for then betray them.
Once they get to Washington, you have to appreciate here, the tremendous pressures to be a, go with the establishment media and all that.
And the money, especially for war, of course, the military industrial complex.
All right.
We got a whole, the right there.
It's John Basil Utley, original.antiwar.com/Utley.
We're talking about polling the right questions on defense voters.
Get it right.
A review of a Scott Rasmussen's new book.
And we'll be right back with John after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're talking with our old friend, John Basil Utley, associate publisher of the American conservative magazine and a piece that originally ran at the American conservative that's, I think it's theamericanconservative.com, or maybe it's just americanconservative.com.
Anyway, it's now running at antiwar.com original.antiwar.com/Utley.
Polling the right questions on defense voters, get it right.
And this really is impressive, especially John, when you go through the list of how many different things Americans are actually pretty good on, it seems like.
If only there was some form of mechanism in our society where people's opinion actually became the policy of the government.
And then that's exactly the point of politicians always try to get away from politicians always try to get away from the votes at every first.
They don't want votes where it's up or down where it shows, you know, they have lots of procedures and the guy can vote for it or against it as one of you sometimes hear for, you know, the guy ran for president and lost.
Um, let me get some other statistics because it really is a key point.
What you said it does.
The system is rigged.
I would say the big thing is gerrymandering where these congressmen get reelected all the time.
You know, 90, 95 percent get reelected because they got so much advantage with money and power and they get rebates.
One of the things in military industrial complex is a lot of that money then flows to congressmen as so-called campaign contributions.
And who knows?
I used to say when they build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska, everybody knows there's no, there's nothing there, the bridge, et cetera.
If they build a missile to nowhere, who knows, is it, should it cost a million dollars or 10 million or 50?
Does it work?
Does it hit its target?
Does it always hit?
Is it dependable?
Nobody knows.
So the great thing about defense spending, no one dares to question it because it's defending our country and nobody knows if these things really work.
And anyway, let me add.
And also I think too, when you get to numbers as big as trillions, it goes right back to what you were saying before about people know that they don't have influence over how trillions are spent.
So they just don't really bother.
And really, numbers like that are so big that they're impossible to imagine.
You know, they say, you know, a million seconds is a week and a half, a trillion seconds is 30,000 years or something.
You know, nobody, I've argued instead of calling it a billion, we should all among ourselves publicly say a thousand million, right?
Because people can more or less comprehend a thousand million dollars.
It's a lot of money.
And a thousand billion is a trillion, a billion nowadays.
I talk about it all the time.
And no big deal.
So let me give a few of the other statistics.
The most in the book that I think are most interesting, 69 percent won competition in health care, 78 percent of Americans won competition in insurance companies.
You know, that's illegal.
It's not allowed.
Most companies just offer the same as another.
You can't choose.
A young person might want to choose an accident.
Policy is the great risk for young as opposed to disease, et cetera.
Sixty eight percent of Americans prefer a government with fewer services and lower taxes.
Seventy nine percent of mainstream American voters, voters, that is, think Americans are overtaxed.
And what we said earlier, the he says, the author of the majority always vote for candidates promising to lower, not raise taxes.
They are almost always betrayed by the political class of both parties.
So you get some idea.
And I might add also that the author says they're a leader.
What's missing is some leadership.
His point is that the American people are way ahead of the political leadership.
He even draws the analogy in the in the Revolutionary War.
The Battle of Concord and Lexington happened 18 months before the Declaration of Independence.
The Americans were willing to fight the British for freedom.
And it came much later when the political class, you know, got behind it.
And he argues that there will be perhaps in the next four years someone will come along and get these issues and make make a campaign on it.
As we once had Reagan, when things look so bad, those of us who go back to the Communist times before Reagan came, it really looked like the communists were winning.
And and and then he came and it all turned around.
So it's not lost yet.
And it's too bad Ron Paul isn't 56 right now.
We just keep running every four years until it collapses.
Maybe next year his son is Ron Paul's not really a politician.
He's more a teacher, you know, and tries to make explain his points.
He doesn't care to win.
But someone's going to come, which his son is very, very capable, I might add.
In four years, it's so America, you know, this country is so fantastic and we have this system.
And as you said, most people, it doesn't affect their immediate lives.
I guess it does more and more like health care.
But the system works.
It just takes time.
I mean, like the last time we did put out a lot of congressmen there, you know, there's a group now somewhere to vote against all incumbent congressmen, try to get them out.
Just anyone who's been in Washington too long becomes corrupted by the system.
Let me give an analogy.
The war with Kosovo, Serbia, you remember that?
The Republicans weren't so supportive because of the it was a Democratic war.
Right.
Some of them even sued over the War Powers Act.
But what was very interesting is the freshman and sophomore and the new Republicans voted nearly all of them against starting another war.
But the Republicans who've been in over four years, that is the establishment Republicans, most of them voted in favor of the war.
There's no better statistic that sort of shows how Washington are corrupt.
Basically.
Well, you know, I have to admit, and maybe it's something to brag about.
Part of the formation, my understanding, the most detailed understanding of how Washington, D.C. works to me is that old Eddie Murphy movie where he's the con artist who gets himself elected to the House by name recognition alone because the candidate dies and he has a name sort of like him and he gets there and he finds out that every single congressman is just a con artist and it's all about you get these industries to bribe you to do horrible things to people and steal money and give it to them.
And the more evil you are, the more money you get and the better chance of being reelected next time.
And I saw that when I was like, I don't know, 15 or something.
I thought, oh, yeah, perfect.
Exactly.
And you don't have to have a more sophisticated understanding than an Eddie Murphy movie, really.
That's the game.
I mean, that Thompson's even in the damn thing.
Yeah, I mean, it is still a movie.
It's not quite.
That's really not quite fair or not fair to many of the young the new congressmen who came in with the way I said it was after they stay here while they get corrupted.
Right.
A lot of people come very dedicated.
The newer ones trying to change things and some stay.
I say Senator Coburn, Senator DeMint.
I mean, there's some who really and of course, Ron Paul, who who maintain their integrity all these years.
But I'm just saying that the pressures in Washington are so strong to corrupt them, et cetera.
But they're not all bad when they come.
You know, a lot of very dedicated and good people.
Yeah.
And really, that's yeah, you're right.
I mean, that's actually the story.
And I kind of paraphrase it too quickly there, where that's what it is.
Is it's he learns very quickly.
This is how it works.
This is how you get on the Ways and Means Committee and whatever.
And it is sort of like that, the the corruption of the process overtaking the men.
And here he's the he starts out the con artist and becomes straight by the end, of course, because it's a movie.
But yeah, I mean, and and but when things get bad enough, which is a financial situation, how we go on with these deficits, eventually it's going to there'll be a tremendous conflict here.
However, if you look at Europe, what's interesting to see is that those countries would rather go bankrupt than change their their ways.
And understanding why Greece and Italy and Spain have these problems, Spain, for example, no worker can be laid off or dismissed after he's worked for whatever it is, six months or a year or three months in some cases.
Well, nobody will nobody will hire people unless they're able to let them go.
If business turns down, it's the most common sense.
No entrepreneur, especially the people who create jobs, are not going to hire anybody if they know that once they've hired that person, they can never lay them off or dismiss them.
And that's those laws.
Spain is doing a tremendous crunch on its whole economy, but they won't change the labor laws.
And Greece had a type typical thing in Greece.
Remember, it cost fifty thousand dollars to start a trucking company with one or two trucks.
Well, the purpose of that is to keep competition out.
Every little industry has its little monopoly and pharmacies have it in Portugal.
And the list is endless where they want to keep competition out.
So you don't have the big the big stores, which, of course, here bring down prices in a big way.
What is it?
Walmart has medicines for four dollars for that affected that someone new coming in the business, cut the prices of these generic medicines tremendously.
Unless you allow competition doesn't happen.
The Europeans have very little competition in their society.
And the lesson for us is when the crunch comes, what's going to happen here?
What are they going to cut?
Right.
Well, you know, I saw Peter Schiff.
I was just mentioning on the show how he's always so full of great metaphors.
He talked about, oh, yeah, there's going to be terrible cuts in austerity.
That means the people who've been riding in the wagon are going to have to get out and help push for a change instead of just getting pulled along on everybody else.
I wouldn't be so sure of that.
They may just figure a new way to get the other people.
They may feed less to the people who are pushing the wagon.
Let's put it that way and still make them go on pushing it.
So it's not sure it works that way.
Yeah, it'd be nice, I guess.
I've seen it.
I live.
Fifteen years in the third world, I've seen these countries down there and what they do.
Well, take Greece.
They they started taxing the lowest income people on the unskilled labor with the minimum wage in Greece now are paying an income tax they didn't pay before.
So they put it.
It's not the class, the ruling class in America, of course, is government employees.
Anyway, when I visited the country, I always would learn, follow, follow the money, see who pays the taxes, who gets the benefits.
Well, in America, everyone who's working for the government has a pension to look forward to that's worth a million dollars, something like that.
If you add it all up, we have a whole system here that's become, I think, now the number one out of seven people work for the government in some way.
And you have to include the military and not the soldiers.
One of the points in Scott Rasmussen's book, there's eight hundred thousand civilians in the men in the military security complex, what we call it, not just the army that's in this the the marshals, you know, all the security, the incredible money and waste in the intelligence community.
The Washington Post had a series that they were reported.
There were 50,000 reports every year between the CIA and all these bundles of intelligence agencies.
Now, 50,000, of course, most were never read.
They're just put in a file.
It's one agency protecting the turf against another.
Well, when we talk about cutting waste in the defense, we don't mean that to cut the combat infantry guys.
We mean the whole structure.
There's more in cutting waste.
You get to this.
There's more generals, four star, five star, whatever they are, than there were at the end of World War Two with three times or six times the number of soldiers.
Our weapons purchases, they have a system where they start producing weapons before they've been tested.
The purpose of that is to get a constituency in every congressional district to promote the weapon, whether or not it works.
The F-22 fighter plane was in 44.
Our states were producing some kind of input for the F-22, which all makes it very expensive.
The input to a fighter plane is not designed to make it the least expensive or most competent.
It's to get political support by having inputs from every state you followed.
So they start producing these the F-35 fighter plane.
They're sitting on runways because they don't have them.
They haven't yet tested all the electronics and all the stuff that goes into it.
And the list is they had to break one test pilot out of the cockpit with a crowbar.
Well, then things don't even work at all.
If you look for waste and now on the Internet, you can find these things.
But the whole system is designed to self perpetuate.
And the money, for example, there was Secretary England is the name who was a assistant secretary of defense or something in the Reagan or Bush times.
And he had a number of five hundred thousand civilians in the Defense Department.
But he pointed out none of them had been caught.
When we had the peace dividend after the collapse of communism, none of the civilians were cut from them from the military support groups.
You know, so it goes on and on and it's all covered up.
The media doesn't ask the right questions.
So many people are part of it.
Of course, the media has to think if they started asking tough questions, then these government officials wouldn't come on their shows.
You've got to allow for that to, you know, their survival to it.
Well, you know, you talk about in the article the trillion dollars a year that the national security budget, as they call it, is now, you know, all combined up to eight trillion, you know, over the last decade or so, according to Chris Hellman at the National Priorities Project.
Sounds about right.
And, you know, you mentioned medicines there and the economy of scale, why medicine can be cheaper if you let it be sold at a huge discount and competition, all that kind of thing.
But it also made me think about all the guys at DARPA who could be in medical research or in some other free market or not that medical research is free market in this country or anything, but they could be applying science and their brilliant engineering and and imagination, mathematical skills into things that help people instead of just helping pilots fly faster to kill more people faster.
You might add people in the military, very skilled.
The U.S. military has some best training and dedicated people, at least when they're young, when they start.
It's like Bill Hicks said, yeah, we can shoot a missile down a chimney and that's pretty impressive.
But couldn't we conceivably use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?
If those people were doing productive work, you have to understand military stuff is totally unproductive.
They build this giant truck, the MRAP, have you heard of Afghanistan?
They don't know how to get them out of the country when we leave.
They're so big and heavy.
And they produced, I think I saw the figure was thirty five thousand of these giant things for carrying soldiers over minefields.
OK, they need certainly a few thousand.
But now they the the waste, all that could go into civilian goods.
Everyone could have a new car.
I mean, if you think all the production into the military and the skilled people that very qualified people spending all their time on trying to figure which tribe in Afghanistan hates us the most, you know, et cetera.
Yeah, it's that lost opportunity cost, the seen and the unseen, where we we don't usually stop to imagine how it could be.
But actually, we've all seen the Jetsons and we all kind of have an idea that we should have flying cars by now.
And it passed the year 2000, we should all have flying cars.
Where did all that wealth go?
Yeah, that's a good point.
All right.
Well, we're way over here.
But thank you so much for coming on the show again, John Scott.
Thanks for doing the show.
And you ask the right questions always, too.
Well, thanks.
Good to talk to you.
See you soon.
Everybody.
That's the great John Basil Utley, the American conservative dot com and original dot antiwar.com/Utley.
