09/13/10 – Kevin Zeese – The Scott Horton Show

All right, welcome back to the show, Zantac War Radio, Scott Horton, thanks for listening to the show today.
On the line is Kevin Zeese from Voters for Peace.
Welcome back to the show, Kevin.
How are you, man?
Great.
Good to hear your voice.
How's the left-right libertarian realignment against the empire going?
I think it's starting to gel.
I think more and more people on the left, in particular, are recognizing the lesson from the Iraq war.
You know, when the anti-war movement was at its peak before Iraq, the invasion and after the invasion, we were not able to stop the war or end the war.
And that's still true today.
You know, even Obama, who's calling the war as an end, he's leaving tens of thousands of troops and tens of thousands more paramilitary private contractors over there.
But the lesson is that we could not influence the end of the war because we all came from one side.
That was a Democrat left side, and President Bush didn't hear from his base.
And so we need to organize people on the right as well as the left so that no matter who's in office, we can pressure the president, and an alliance of right and left can move Congress to use their powers to stop war funding.
But an alliance of just the left, no matter how strong it is, is not going to affect Republicans, because the Republican base needs to oppose these wars as much as the Democrat base.
We have a lot of work to do to organize the right.
And you know, Scott, that there's a long history of opposition to war on the right, from the Philippines War up to the World Wars, even in Vietnam.
And that traditional conservative ideology of avoiding military intervention has been drowned out by the neoconservatives who've taken over the conservative mantle.
And we need to restore that traditional conservative voice that comes out against war.
Now I come at this from a left perspective.
I'm not aligned with any political party, but I'm certainly left of center.
And so I'm very comfortable talking to workers and to people from that perspective.
But we need to reach out beyond that.
We need a broad basis for, we need an American anti-war movement, not a left anti-war movement.
We need to really have something that can be effective in stopping these juggernauts that lead to wars and continue these wars.
Right on.
As you know, that's my sentiment exactly since I started doing pirate radio in 1999 or something, I figured.
I think I might could talk to the right because I'm a libertarian and I understand their point of view on a lot of things like the populist, really anti-government right, not just the anti-Bill Clinton right, but the real anti-government right and anti-war right.
And of course, I'm friends with a bunch of lefties mostly.
And so I like them and I, well, the reason that I was always such a big Justin Raimondo fan since I ever found anti-war.com, I was just thrilled to even know the libertarians owned the URL anti-war.com because I think that for anyone who cares about human rights and liberty at all, you have to oppose war.
It's the germ of every evil thing going on in this society.
And that's a lot, Kevin, we got to stop it.
Man, I swear to God, I don't care what you believe about anything else, but the bill of rights and war.
Everything else doesn't matter to me at all.
Right.
Well, you know, it really is the root of so many of the economic problems the country is facing.
We really have an empire economy and that's not talked about a lot in the United States, but we have an empire economy and what I mean by that is we have more than 700 military bases around the world, more than a thousand military bases and outposts around the world.
And we use our military power and our economic power to really try to dictate world policy.
And because we have so many client states, we have to create jobs in those client states.
And that's costing the United States' industrial base and treaties like NAFTA are great for corporations but not great for the American worker.
And so we're seeing that kind of empire economy hurting us at home.
And I think that's part of what we're seeing in the American economy.
It's not the whole story, but it's a big part of the story.
I'm glad you mentioned anti-war.com.
I met with Justin Raimondo and Eric Garrett and Angela Keaton who works with you when I was out in California recently and they are, that's a great website for those who really want to know what's going on in war and militarism around the world.
They cover the whole gambit and they do it from a perspective that's cross-ideological.
I get published on that website, I'm coming from the left, people from the right, libertarians, liberals, democrats, anyone who's opposed to war and empire has a home in that place.
And anyone who's opposed to war and empire, it can use that website as a great place for talking points and to really know what's going on around the world.
That is a great place to start, I find to be a very useful resource.
So they're very excited about this left-right alliance and I'm really happy working with them on it.
I think there's a great potential there.
But yeah, I think you're right about how war and military spending, and I hate calling it defense spending by the way, that's such a fraudulent term, it's not defense spending in our country, it's war and weapons spending, and we should call it by that name because that's what it really is.
It makes up half of our discretionary spending.
So you hear the Obama Deficit Commission talking about getting control of deficits, they don't talk about cutting military budget though, they talk about cutting Social Security, which has actually brought in so many trillions of dollars and has money that is raised that will keep Social Security stable for decades, but they're going after Social Security and Medicare rather than the war budget.
Start with the war budget.
There's bloat in there, there's waste in there, we're spending as much as the whole world combined on weapons and war, it's time to cut that budget and do it quickly because it's an out-of-control spending mechanism.
It's just like, you know, they always say about a carpenter, he's going to, you know, he has a hammer, he's going to nail.
Well, the same thing is true with our country, if we're going to spend half of our discretionary spending on weapons and war, we're going to use weapons and war to solve foreign policy problems.
I'm very disappointed to see Obama, for example, now pushing the largest ever weapons selling package, $60 billion to Saudi Arabia, that's the last thing the Middle East needs is more weapons and more war, and that's what Obama's going to be providing with that multi-billion dollar sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which he's about to notify Congress about.
So we have a lot of our work cut out for us, and I think another reason why a right-left war is because it makes us pure, it makes us clearly against war and empire.
And that purity of that statement is very powerful because right now you have a lot of anti-war folks still confused because we have a Democratic president of the White House who came in as the anti-war candidate, he's thinking, end the Iraq war, and he's now putting out this, you know, misinformation about how the Iraq war is ending.
We've had troops dying in Iraq, you know, since he said the combat operations were finished, they died in combat.
So I don't know what he's talking about, but he's pulling the wool over the eyes of the American people with those speeches.
But a lot of Democrats who oppose the war are not sure what to do.
And if we had a right-left, very clear anti-war, anti-empire organization like we're developing at comehomeamerica.us, then you would see us standing up to a Democratic president when he puts out misinformation like that, and you see the anti-war movement protesting when he campaigns in favor of expanding the Afghanistan war, you know, protesting the use of the drone that he's been using that kill more civilians than kill enemies.
We see that kind of thing.
So I'm pretty optimistic this is going to happen.
And you know, our next step in comehomeamerica.us is to put out a book, which is going to be called comehomeamerica.us.
It'll be coming out later this month or early next month, and it's going to be a history of anti-war activism from across the political spectrum, a current discussion of the wars we're currently involved in from people from different views on the political spectrum, and a look toward the future of what can be done.
So I hope you will go to comehomeamerica.us, sign up, and start to get involved, because we are going to create an American anti-war movement like we've never seen before, and one that's essential, because we are now engaged in not just the Iraq and Afghanistan war, as well as the attacks in Pakistan, we're engaged in what the Pentagon calls the long war.
People who are listening to this program now will see war the rest of their lives unless the American people put a stop to it.
That's our responsibility.
So an American anti-war movement is urgently needed.
We need to wake up the American public, and the American public needs to wake up the politicians to tell them we're not going to have a lifetime of war.
We're not going to live through generations of war.
We have domestic priorities that need to be funded.
We have people struggling to make ends meet, and we need to restore our economy and not be spending our money on weapons and war around the world.
Well, you know, I think that's such an important point, and it's kind of difficult to get a show on Pacifica Radio, because I guess they're afraid I'm going to talk about Austrian economics or something like that, but my thing is, we can all agree, all good people, decent people can agree, all that money would be better spent here at home, and we'll just leave out who you want to spend it.
Maybe you want the government to spend it on more schools, I would rather have people spend it themselves or whatever instead.
But that's not the point.
The point is, our society is committing suicide right now with this long war, and man, I value your priorities, Kevin.
I always talk into the damn break.
Hang right there.
We'll be right back with you, dude.
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I'm about to have a nervous breakdown.
My head really hurts.
And I know I'll find a way out of here.
I'm gonna go to the cliff.
I'm crazy and I'm hurt.
And I wish it was...
All right, well, it's just like Condoleezza Rice and Rahm Emanuel said, every crisis is an opportunity.
And as America falls apart, more and more people are realizing what's at the core of it all.
You just heard Kevin Zeese call it by its true name, the long war.
And, you know, when he said that there about, you know, are we gonna have war for the rest of our lives?
It got me thinking, you know, there are kids right now in this country who are old enough to skateboard, who are, you know, in fifth grade or something now, who've never known peacetime in their life.
I mean, when I was a kid in the 80s, it was kind of the Cold War.
And, jeez, I hope Ronald Reagan doesn't get us into a nuclear war.
But there was no Vietnam going on.
There was a relative peacetime.
That was my childhood.
And, you know, there are kids I care about very, very much that they've never...
To them, this is just normal, Kevin.
Their government just killing people every day is just the way things are.
And not only that, I mean, of course, the Afghanistan war, the longest war in American history already.
And its end is not anywhere near in sight.
In fact, things keep getting worse there.
One of the great tragedies is the lack of transparency.
You know, we don't even see the coffins, you know, coming home.
We don't see President Obama going to funerals of soldiers.
We certainly don't see the impact of the drones on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan on civilians.
You know, President Obama even hid pictures, photographs of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
So we're not even told the whole truth.
So we have this ongoing war.
You know, we've been at war for a decade almost, and the end is not in sight.
And we don't even know what's really happening in our name.
So I really applaud people like Bradley Manning, who's accused of leaking that collateral attack video and other documents.
I applaud WikiLeaks.
In fact, I'm on the Bradley Manning Support Committee Advisory Board.
You go to BradleyManning.org and get involved in defending this young kid who knew when he released these documents that he saw war crimes in, he knew he was facing potential life in prison.
And that kind of courage deserves our support.
So I hope people will go and sign up, get involved.
We're going to have a bunch of actions in the next 10 days or so listed on the Bradley Manning website.
And get involved there, really get active there, and really show the government we want to know what's being done in our name.
You know, before the break you mentioned that all good people who oppose war, weapons, and empire can come together no matter what their views are on other economic issues, and I agree with that.
And I'll take a step further and say we need to come together because a left-only or a left-dominated anti-war movement cannot stop or prevent or end wars.
We proved that in Iraq.
You know, before the Iraq war we saw some of the largest demonstrations before a war in America's history.
We racked up, you know, literally millions of people protesting.
It took a decade for Vietnam to get that strong.
We did it before the war even began.
And it continued after the war.
There were protests in Congress.
You know, Democrats took back control of the House and the Congress in 2006 because of the anti-war movement.
And yet we still failed to stop the war.
It's ongoing today.
And what that proves, I think, is beyond anyone's doubt now, is that a left-only anti-war movement cannot succeed.
In fact, the only time we ever slowed a military spending bill was when the left and right came together in Congress.
And that's what it's going to take.
And we need to build up both branches of that.
We need to continue the outreach to unions, to environmentalists, to women's groups, to civil rights groups on the left side.
We also need to reach out on the right and let those traditional conservatives see that there are good reasons for conservatives to oppose war.
I think with a Democratic president in office, there's a better chance of doing that now than we've had in a long time.
The Democratic commander-in-chief, a lot of Republicans and conservatives are ready to criticize him.
And so this is an opportunity to really reach those people and get them involved and educate them and let them see that no matter who is president, Democrat or Republican, war is not good.
Empire is not good for our national security.
It makes more enemies than it stops.
War is not good for our economy.
Spending literally trillions of dollars on these wars and barring the money to be able to do that, it's not good for our democracy.
It undermines democracy.
It's not good for the rule of law, which is also undermined.
So war and empire are not useful for the American way.
The thing is, Kevin, I've got to bring the bad news into this situation.
Gaffney, Horowitz, Horowitz, of all people, we've got, I mean, I'm sure you saw the last couple of remandos or at least one of the last two.
Politico.com went and followed the money.
We have the absolute lowest, most vilest scum of the bottom of the neoconservative movement dictating the entire American conversation now, apparently.
And like in Tennessee, where the mosque that's been there for 30 years never had a problem after 9-11 at all.
Nine years later, David Horowitz yells, jump at these freaking idiots, and they turn on their neighbors, the mosque in their neighborhood, because David Horowitz tells them to, because the pro-Israel lobby, the war party, the worst part of it, is determined to turn the Tea Party movement from an anti-bailout movement and a Ron Paul-ian, lean-in, eh, maybe he's got a point about foreign policy-type movement into a, no, what we really hate is the weak.
And it's working.
It's like, snap your fingers, and a right-winger turns from, eh, Mike could be okay, to the devil overnight.
Well, yeah, no, that's definitely our problem.
That's why it's so interesting, the neocons have become the enemies of traditional conservatives, even more so than they've become the enemies of people on the left.
A lot of them come out of the left and have moved towards this neocon position, and then, of course, you have the neoliberals, who are the folks behind the Democratic Leadership Conference, the corporate Democrats who support war.
So we do have big enemies.
We have big enemies, and they're supported in the corporate media as well.
And so we have a lot, that's why it just highlights to me why it's even more important for us to emphasize people from across the political spectrum who oppose war and empire.
We need Americans to see that no matter what your view is on the economy, no matter what your view is on gay rights, on civil rights, on women's rights, no matter what your view on other issues are, there are people who oppose war and empire who share your views.
We need to show that there's an American opposition to war.
And the fact is, the polls often do show that.
It takes a propaganda effort by the government to really pump up the weapons of mass destruction fears, months and months of drumbeats of war in order to get the American public to support the invasion of Iraq.
Right now the Afghanistan war has very high unpopularity.
So we have the people on our side, but we need to show the people that we are organized enough to do something about it, and that's our task, and that's why we have to form an American anti-war movement that brings people from across the political spectrum together to oppose war and empire to say, no, we don't want the long war to last for generations, for every American alive today to live the rest of his or her life with war as the dominant economic spending in the country.
We need to take back our country, bring it back to it, bring it back home.
That's why I love the name Come Home America.
ComeHomeAmerica.us is the website, and Come Home America is a phrase actually that comes out of Dr. Martin Luther King's Riverside speech against the Vietnam War.
It was George McGovern's campaign slogan when he was opposed to the Vietnam War.
It's a phrase, Come Home America, that also rings true with people in the Midwest, people in the traditional conservative movement.
It's a phrase that says what we really stand for.
Let's put our economy in order first.
Let's put our democracy in order first.
Let's stop this intervention around the world and stop this militarism that's sucking the lifeblood out of our country.
I have to say, Kevin, here, I have to say, for the ignorant out there, please just go to YouTube and look for Martin Luther King, Vietnam.
That Riverside speech is the best speech a man ever gave to anybody ever, and it will make you wiser.
Also, I want to say real quick.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
It just tied together war with domestic priorities.
It was a brilliant speech, and I agree people should live and do it and study it because it's one that will get you to understand that anti-war is pro-American.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And you know what?
Just before you, I was talking with John Basil Utley, the son of the famous anti-communist author Frieda Utley and the associate publisher of the American Conservative Magazine, and just this morning I posted three interviews of, I think they were all three lefties from the other day.
Oh, yeah, it was Gareth Porter, Nick Turse, and anyway.
All good people, man.
You have the right people, Juan.
Oh, and Juan Cole.
So I posted these on my Facebook page, and this libertarian started attacking me for legitimizing the left and how terrible it is for me to try to work with leftists on the most important thing in the world.
And then I went over to the American Conservative Magazine to look for John Utley's article, and there on the front page of the American Conservative Magazine is Nick Turse and Juan Cole, two out of my three guests right there.
So, you know, there's a lesson there for people.
And look, we're talking about killing people.
We're talking about destroying the Bill of Rights forever.
I mean, this is it.
It's the only thing that matters is American foreign policy.
That's it.
Get it together, folks.
Follow Kevin Z's.
He will help you.
ComeHomeAmerica.us.
Voters for Peace.
Thank you, Kevin.
Thank you.
Boy, I'm ending every interview with a random I own now, but oh well.