All right y'all, welcome back to the show, Santau War Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is Mark Ames, he's the author of Going Postal, and he keeps the great website ExiledOnline.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing Mark?
Thanks for having me back on, always a pleasure, I'm doing all right.
All right, well good deal, thanks for joining me.
Hey listen, I'm really ignorant about Russia, it's, well it's never been something that was a great interest of mine I guess, and especially, you know, post-Cold War world and whatever, it's not quite at the top of everybody's agenda like it was when I was a kid in the 80s, but then again they still have thousands of hydrogen bombs pointed at us and vice versa, and so it still seems like Russia and America's relationship with Russia is probably the most important issue on Earth.
So I was thinking maybe I could learn more about it from you, since you were a journalist there in Russia for how many years, and from when to when now?
Well, the exile went on for 11 years, and then in June of 2008, basically the federal agents, government federal agents decided to do an urgent unplanned audit of our editorial content, and that scared away the investors and the paper just collapsed pretty quickly and I got the hell out of town.
Yeah, yeah, I actually read a little bit about that.
And so you were there from, I guess, basically the mid-90s, something like that, so you saw the transition from Yeltsin to Putin and all that from Moscow, huh?
Yeah, exactly, I mean I came out first a few years before we started up the exile, I came out sort of like 94, end of 93, and things changed, you know, incredibly, and when I got there, actually I came here as a student first in 91, right after the failed putsch against Gorbachev, and it was a really exciting time actually, it was very inspiring, it was before capitalism and the freeing up of prices, and everybody was really active and idealistic and talking, trying to talk through and figure out what the next, what a better government would be like and a better system and so on, and that deteriorated very quickly, I mean a couple months later, I mean at the end of 91, Yeltsin took over and his economic team, which was basically backed and trained by Harvard and by Larry Summers, who's running our economy now, these guys took over, freed up prices, everybody was thrown into poverty and destitution, the economy completely collapsed, and the death rate soared, and so I came back a few years later and it was just a completely different country, it was a pretty mean place, and it didn't really start getting better until that whole thing collapsed and the American advisors and the AMS and everybody went home, and the Russians started running things on their own under Putin.
And that started immediately after Putin took power in 2000 then, or before that?
I would say within a couple, I mean I'd say you started to understand that something was fundamentally changing a couple years after Putin took power, I mean when things were starting to turn around after basically Putin took power, you know, everybody was very skeptical I mean he was hand-picked by Yeltsin and Putin, no one was really sure what he was like, there were a lot of indications that he might be some kind of neo-liberal quasi-dictator, pro-Western even, and then there were other indications that, you know, maybe he was actually a nationalist, and everybody was kind of wondering where the hell he stood, he's a pretty cagey guy and he's trying to, you know, stake out his own power position in a really rough neighborhood.
You know, ultimately we found out he's just, I mean, the big problem really with trying to understand, you know, places like Russia and Ukraine is trying to understand them in American terms, are they pro-Western, are they anti-Western, are they, you know, red state or blue state, and they just have their own culture and their own dynamic that has nothing to do with ours, and we kind of superimpose really idiotic narratives over what's really going on in a place like that.
All right, well, so let's rewind a little bit before we get into Putin years and America's relationship with Russia as it stands now and all that, I want to go back and talk about a little bit of what exactly all this shock therapy was, is this basically the economic hitman model where they encourage a bunch of debt and then basically just liquidate all the real assets and run?
You know, it was a different version of something, at least the sinister, it was basically, the idea was, look, I mean, Russia, unlike a lot of these other countries where there were shock therapy programs, Russia's actually a very rich country, it has, you know, all the world's resources are there, whether it's diamonds, gold, timber, you know, obviously oil, gas, etc., and in late 91 and 92, before they actually decided how to give you that up or what to do with it, it was still owned, in reality, by the people, right?
And so there was a big question, what do we do with this stuff, how do we make these companies, you know, work better, how do we make them more efficient, how do we make the economy efficient, etc., etc., and it wound up being too tempting of a morsel to pass up, and ultimately what they decided was, let's create an oligarchy class, a new elite, which is, you know, completely invested in maintaining what, you know, the current power structure, just seen as a pro-Western neo-liberal power structure, and the way we create that is by just giving these companies, these unbelievably, you know, wealthy companies, companies that are worth billions, and handing it over to this hand-picked group of insiders for nothing, actually sometimes they paid for these things in these rigged auctions, they paid for them by stealing unpaid wages to doctors and teachers and, you know, policemen and so on from the regions, and they'd steal that and pay what was even still ridiculously low prices for these assets.
And yeah, so I think, you know, I've heard this a lot in the 2000s from people who worked on Russian elections in sort of the very, very early 90s, they said, you know, in the early 90s we had a choice, we could have actually helped prop up Gorbachev.
He asked us for our help, and, you know, we could have helped him sort of prop up the ruble because it was collapsing and that was making Gorbachev more and more unpopular, and we were going to do that, but instead these economic hitmen, these neo-liberals, you know, these people under Larry Summers' watch, basically decided, no, screw him, because what he wants is a social democratic system, a kind of Scandinavian-style system, and we want a radical free market system, we want to make Russian markets, you know, open to American goods, Western goods, we want to be able to buy their companies, we want to, you know, write their rules, we want to make sure that they don't become enemies, we want to control the place and steal their valuable stuff.
So they basically hung Gorbachev out to dry and helped install Yeltsin into power, and Yeltsin, you know, turned out to be such an incredibly incompetent, corrupt, drunk buffoon that Russians will not, Russians will for years identify democracy and capitalism with the disaster that happened in the 90s under Yeltsin.
They don't like those words.
Yeah, well, and you know me, I'm a libertarian, so I've got to defend the term free market here.
So you're saying free market to have a communist system where everything is controlled by the central government, everything is owned by the central government, and then it all just gets handed over to criminals.
I mean, it's all about the transition, right?
I mean...
Oh, absolutely.
It was rigged.
The whole thing was rigged.
Under the guise of free market.
Right, right.
The worst cronyism, really.
And this is something that's not happening just in Russia, but all over South America and all over the world, you have basically the American imperial gangsters come in and do this economic hitman type stuff where they just, they deliberately get countries into debt that they can't pay just as an excuse to steal all their most valuable assets and then just liquidate them, take all the money and run for short term gain.
And I, you know, for this kind of gangsterism to be called free markets, that's what the fascists call it.
Let's not buy into their rhetoric.
It's the worst form of cronyism that we're talking about here.
And of course, I'm agreed with you that it was the Americans that were really forcing most of this stuff on them.
Yeah.
And they, you know, look, the Russians didn't know.
They really looked up to us, you know, in a lot of parts of the world, especially those that didn't know it.
The Russians, you know, ironically enough, because of the Cold War, because they didn't have much, you know, they actually didn't know us really very well, except for whatever caricatures they gleaned.
They admired America.
They admired sort of the way we market ourselves.
And they listened to us.
They actually thought we were better than them in the early 90s.
They thought we knew better than they did.
And they didn't know how to make this transition, really.
And what happened was, you know, really opportunists, I mean, really the rankest, most corrupt, fleezy opportunists wound up, you know, controlling the whole process on both sides with no regard whatsoever to Russia or the consequences.
And then what really gaunt me is then when the whole thing collapsed in the late 90s, then you have, you know, all these people who worked, you know, all these Americans who worked on Russia and promoted what a great success story it was the whole time and kept promoting it, kept doling out billions.
And then when it all collapsed, they said, oh, well, you know, it was really Russia's fault.
It was never ours to lose.
You know, we did the right thing.
They just, they just didn't respond properly.
Their culture is screwed up, etc.
So they blamed the patient for not responding to this, you know, savage medicine.
And that's what's really screwed up.
I mean.
Well, let's talk about the consequences here.
I mean, I don't know really the details.
I hope you can really flesh them out.
But I remember reading about how the life expectancy in Russia just plummeted.
You know, I mean, we're talking about people starving.
We're talking about America didn't just kick them when they're down, we kicked them almost to death.
Yeah, I know.
And you'd see it like the Republican National Convention.
We won the Cold War.
I mean, come on, you know, the Russians had something to do with ending communism.
They were they were completely sick of it and they had been for years.
But the consequences of what went on in the 90s were unbelievably tragic and no one would write about it.
It was frustrating.
The economy, the GDP collapsed 60 percent, I think the largest, worst collapse of an economy in the 20th century of any industrialized economy.
You're right.
The average life expectancy of men dropped something like 12 years, 11 years.
It went from 68 under Brezhnev, which is not great, but, you know, they'd give anything to get their back there again.
And it went down to as low as 57 or 56 under Yeltsin.
In fact, the death to birth ratio in the 90s under Yeltsin was also among the very worst of the 20th century.
It was worse than, if you can imagine, it was worse than the death to birth ratio under Stalin.
I don't get it, but I guess they were having a lot more babies back then.
That's, I suppose, the explanation for that.
But yeah, people were dropping like flies.
They didn't have, I mean, not only did they not have money anymore, but they watched their entire country get just robbed blind and, you know, they lost hope.
And everybody in every factory where they worked or every company that they worked, they in their own kind of micro-world way saw the same kind of dynamics that was happening all over the country.
And usually there'd be a director or somebody up at the very top just stealing everything, like in Goodfellas, just selling everything out the back door, and then when it was done, you'd burn the place down, you know?
And so people also just really lost hope, turned to alcoholism and vodka, you know, in a way that even Russians hadn't done before.
And their president was a drunk, too, so he was kind of, you know, an inspiration in that.
Suicide, you know, soared, divorce rates soared, etc., etc.
So yeah, it was just, it was basically as much of a disaster as, let's say, you know, Stalin's experiment in the 1930s.
I mean, there are some estimates that six to seven million Russians went to their graves earlier than they normally would have in the 1990s.
And again, this isn't something people want to talk about yet, because America had a lot to do with that, and we don't like to think that our policies can lead to those kinds of disasters.
So we just said, oh, it's their fault.
Yeah.
Well, and you mentioned there Larry Summers.
He's the guy that destroyed all of Harvard's wealthers, the richest university in America.
He bankrupted them.
You mentioned there that he was involved in Russia, and I saw an article that you'd written here at Exile Online about his role in destroying wealth in India.
And now this is the guy who is telling, he's the official chair of some committee of, you know, telling Barack Obama what to do about the economy right now.
Yeah, he runs, really the economies are running it out of the White House.
And you know, for whatever reason, there was some sort of consensus view among sort of establishment Democrats and Republicans last fall that Obama had to pick Larry Summers.
And Obama, being also a consensus guy, was happy to do that.
I mean, Summers apparently has some kind of technical smarts, although the guy's a complete — not only is he a total failure at everything he's done, but he's rather bizarre.
You know, I mean, I think he's kind of a freak.
If you look at, like, the stories that you read about what he's done and even said, leaving aside, again, his economic policies, like, for example, in 1991, when he worked at the World Bank, he forwarded a memo to his superior that suggested we should maybe consider dumping toxic waste from the First World into Africa, because Africans are worth less economically than First World people, and, you know, to promote — I mean, basically we should promote people who provide value or are valued more and kill off those who aren't.
I mean, like Nazis.
Wow.
Yeah.
Man, I need to blog that.
You'll have to send me a link to that quote.
I love it.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And, you know, in Summers, he really — he just left the trail of destruction wherever he was.
I mean, people don't talk about this much, but he served on Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors — White House Advisors.
He wasn't the main guy like he is now, but he was one of the members of the Council back in 1982.
1982, 1983.
And, you know, it didn't do too well, and then he switched over and became a kind of neoliberal Democrat, and the guy's been — you know, he was a top advisor to Dukakis, and he ran Clinton's — you know, well, he and Bob Rubin pretty much ran Clinton's economic team.
These are the guys that fashion all of these IMF bailouts, you know, which kind of set the stage for the big bailout we just had a couple years ago.
These Wall Street banks go in to all these terrible countries, get them, you know, massively in debt, and then when they can't pay it off anymore, then the taxpayers come in and bail the country out, or actually bail out the bondholders, and then the country is left destitute.
And so, Summers, you know, he's — basically, wherever he's gone, he's left a trail of destruction.
Look at what he did in Lithuania.
In 1990, Summers was hired as an economic advisor to Lithuania, which was preparing to break free, and they wanted to go, you know, Western, whatever.
They wanted a non-communist economic policy, and they wanted a democratic system.
So Summers comes in in 1990 to advise on their economy.
Two years later, the economy is in such a shambles that Lithuania actually is the first East European country to vote back the communists, and these guys just had, you know, people dying fighting Soviet soldiers the year before, but things were so bad after Summers' advice.
The suicide rate soared to the highest in the world in Lithuania.
You know, so that gives you an example.
Then he moves from Lithuania to basically running Russia, and we know what happened there.
Then he goes to Harvard, bankrupts the place, and now he's running our economy.
So we're in good hands.
Wow.
It really is amazing.
I guess, you know, there are only a few dozen really smart, capable people in our society, and so we're just stuck with them, apparently.
I don't know.
I know.
Yeah.
I think you just have to royally screw up so badly.
It's like there's some kind of secret society, you know, where the only way you can get entrance into it is to just massively, catastrophically screw up something, and all these people are bound by that one, you know, that one experience.
Yeah.
And the more people that starve, the better, the higher the rank you get or something.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And see, here's the thing, too.
I mean, when you talk about the way they looted Russia, I mean, this is the same way you've described what they've done to America, and I think we talked on the show before a little bit about this town in Alabama where the guy went postal and shot a bunch of people.
They called out the army because they just didn't have the sheriff's department to, you know, man the street corners or whatever during a crisis like that.
And the reason why was because Wall Street had come and preyed on this little town in Alabama like it was one of these third world countries that we exploit.
But see, here's the rub.
How are we supposed to maintain a world empire that gets to expand NATO all the way into Lithuania and into Poland and put missiles 40 miles from Moscow and all this stuff, take over all of Central Asia at the same time that these same people are cannibalizing our own country?
Yeah, absolutely.
I know.
You know, it's as though the most powerful people in this country, you know, these Wall Street billionaires, it's as though they're some kind of foreign alien colonial power that are just, they look at this country as just a place to strip as quickly as possible before they move on to the next place.
I mean, it's as if they have no tie to this country whatsoever or probably despise the place.
I don't know.
It's insane.
It's absolutely insane and it's sick and people should be, you know, the key part here is, I mean, what I really like about them is that they do something and they put the fear of God into some powerful people.
But they really ought to, you know, bad as the health care proposal may be, I mean, the real problem is the fact that we're being, you know, exploited and ruined by Wall Street and that's where the real problem is.
That's the heart of it.
But yeah, you're right.
Talking about the empire, I mean, that's a great point and I've been thinking about that lately as well.
How did that even happen?
You know, there was a point when the Cold War ended when we could have gone in two directions.
One would have been a much more sort of humble direction where we don't try to control the entire world.
Even Jean Kirkpatrick, the neocon, said, now we can be a normal country in a normal time.
Yeah, and that would have been the sensible thing to do.
But apparently it wasn't sexy enough for the idiots in power and these guys, you know, it was a time when people were really boiled over by all these words like, you know, you've got to take big risks, big gambles, you know, you've got to think big, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, this is like people who kind of move in and out of the business world and politics world.
They really bought into this BS.
And I just think what happened was in the battle for ideas, I mean, there weren't, I don't know, sort of rational, sane ideas couldn't hold up to insane, pseudo-bold ideas like let's have full spectrum dominance on every country in the world and, you know, make sure that we control all the resources and all this other crap that, you know, Wolfowitz and Cheney proposed doing way back in 92.
Well, that's really the thing, right?
Is that toward the end of the Cold War, the liberal side, the left side became dominated by the neoliberals, which is just a nice way of saying Democratic Party imperialists.
And then on the conservative side, anybody who was, even had any mention of humble republicanism or anything that even smelled like that was purged out of conservative movement by the neoconservatives.
And so we just have the war party left in power and it's us versus them and they have all the levers of control and we got none.
Except that they're failures, I mean, they are the biggest losers.
And I don't know why people in mainstream media aren't calling them out more, why there's not somebody, you know, on the left or, you know, on the right more.
I'm talking about sort of in the big mainstream world, just calling them out.
These guys are losers, they're failures.
And if there's one thing Americans, left, right, centered, just can't stand, it's losers like this.
These guys dragged us into two lost wars, you know, the economy tanked.
I mean, how much more could they screw up?
We shouldn't have been where we are right now in just massive decline and kind of deteriorating into a sort of a third world banana republic.
We shouldn't be in this position.
There's nothing natural, there was nothing, you know, predestined about this.
It was the result of this country being led by the nose by idiots and failures and losers.
And unfortunately, a lot of them are still there.
I mean, the fact that now Larry Summers is back and running the economy shows that there's something ingrained in our elite right now where, you know, success and failure are an accountability.
They're just, they have nothing to do with it.
It's just about protecting themselves.
And I'm sure whatever Summers and Geithner is another, you know, another guy who's got a track record of just catastrophic failures.
These guys are taking care of their own and, you know, those people probably don't see them as losers because they've made out really well, but the rest of us are losing.
I think we need to recognize, you know, the consequences to all of us of trying to run this empire for God knows what reason.
I mean, it's just screwed everything up.
That's funny.
Barack Obama is Boris Yeltsin, which I hope that doesn't mean that we need a Putin like General Petraeus to come and actually do something patriotic.
Seems like that's the direction we're headed, man.
I agree.
You know, I think it's getting more and more dangerous because it's kind of going, yeah, the direction like with Russia, I mean, people are starting to lose faith in democracy here on the, you know, on the right and on the left.
They're understanding how corrupted this system is.
You know, they're losing faith in all the institutions and in the media, which Americans always had kind of believed, took on faith that it was all true and they don't anymore.
And in democracy and the system and, you know, ultimately you can go back and forth between the so-called liberal guy and the so-called conservative guy so many times and get disappointed so many times before you turn to something else out of desperation.
And I think people need to start sort of thinking about that pretty seriously, because I think it's a real possibility.
Yeah.
And, you know, we shouldn't wait for it to happen, we should, you know, try to do something before that.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing.
I mean, it's to me pretty obvious.
I'm going to go ahead and hang my hat on and I'll let you know if I change my mind.
But right now, I'm just certain that Petraeus is going to run for president in 2012.
And even if he wears a three piece suit and not his general's uniform, that still is way too much power in the hands of the Pentagon.
And it seems like as the unemployment rate continues to climb and all indications are it's going to continue to climb for, you know, perhaps the long term that we might be headed into a 1930s type era in this country.
You know, hell, they almost got a fascist dictatorship back then, except they recruited the wrong general, you know?
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
There was a Patriot.
And I agree.
It's scary.
It's very scary.
And I agree that he might do that.
And, you know, one of the reasons he might be able to is because the military is still one of the last trusted institutions.
And that's all thanks to, you know, all the propaganda we've gotten through through movies about what a perfectly efficient, uncorrupt, you know, only doing the right thing sort of, you know, machine it is.
And I think a lot of Americans mistakenly look at the military, which is just a gigantic behemoth and, you know, basically is the government to a huge degree, but they look at it as something that is almost in contrast to the government, which they see as something corrupt and failed and, you know, not working for Americans' interests.
They think the military is somehow pure and efficient and patriotic and, I mean, sure, they're patriotic, but it's a gigantic bureaucracy with moneyed interests and it's interested in war, obviously.
That's what they do.
That's their business.
And if this guy comes to power, he's no Eisenhower, you know?
I mean, he comes from this age of ours, and it's a very, very cynical age without much idealism.
I find that really scary.
And you know, that's something to think about when opposing Obama.
I mean, it's no reason to really support Obama, but, you know, it could always be a lot worse.
And I keep reminding myself of that, and I'm not sure exactly what that means either, but it can be a lot worse and probably will be a lot worse than Obama.
Yeah, well, if only he would do a couple of things that were, you know, not just bloody murder, lying, imprisoning people without trials, I'd try to defend him.
There's just nothing to defend there, which makes him, you know, if he's the last guy before the dictator, then, you know, whose fault is that?
But his, you know what I mean?
There's nothing to defend here that I can see.
You know, I'm still searching in vain, because I still don't hate him as much as I hated George Bush.
It took me no time to hate George Bush as much as I hated Bill Clinton, but I'm still working on hating Obama quite that much.
But I'm just, you know, I heard Bob Dreyfuss try to explain that Obama really doesn't want to do all the terrible things he's doing for half an hour before I talk to you, and I just wasn't convinced.
Yeah, that's what, you know, they always say that in Russia, like, you know, the czar is good if only his advisors were good like him and, you know, weren't giving him such bad advice.
I mean, the thing about Obama is that, I think, the difference between Bush and Obama is, you know, Bush was kind of a radical in all the wrong ways.
I mean, he was one of these idiot risk-takers and bold thinkers, but I say that very ironically.
He thought, oh, well, you know, we can take the oil and spread pro-Western, pro-Israeli democracy if we invade this country and occupy them, and they'll love us, you know.
It's the most idiotic idea on Earth.
And at least with Obama, Obama is a centrist, and it's something I never understood from the left.
They put so much hope in him, I guess because he's African-American or because he's a smart guy.
They all thought he was going to do something radical and progressive, and he's not.
He's the guy who, as far as I can tell, he's just going to go with the consensus, and unfortunately our consensus right now is just so warped and, you know, degenerate, and those are the people.
I mean, it's that consensus of the kind of powerful elite in Washington and New York who are guiding Obama, and he's not going to go against them.
He's not a radical.
He doesn't come from a family background like FDR, where he feels, I don't know, enough sense of entitlement where he can take on these powerful people.
I mean, that's not how he got to where he is, by taking them on.
And so we're just going to basically be run by the consensus, and we see the results going right into the ground again.
All right, so let's talk a little bit about the future of America's relationship with Russia, because now they have Putin, Putin the Patriot, as Justin Raimondo calls him, who you can call him any name you want.
He's not a betrayer of his own people, at least not to the same degree that Yeltsin is, but he basically just comes from one of these different crime rings of oligarchical former KGB guys, right, and he just won out dominance over the others, but at least has not been a sellout to America all this time, the way Yeltsin was.
Is that basically about right?
Yeah, I mean, you know, Yeltsin and his team really did depend a lot on America and the Treasury Department, Clinton's Treasury Department and IMF and World Bank and so on for his power base until all that collapsed.
And Putin, I mean, you know, you can't run Russia and be Gandhi.
It's a tough, rough neighborhood.
And Putin, you know, for his fault, and he obviously has a lot of them, and I wouldn't want him running our country, but he's probably the best that they've had, I don't know in how long.
I mean, he is much more of a patriot, certainly, than Yeltsin.
You know, among other things, for example, he told the oligarchs, look, here's the deal.
You guys get out of politics, you know, and you can keep your companies and run them, but you've got to get out of politics and you've got to pay taxes and not, you know, funnel all of your earnings, all of Russia's wealth offshore.
You've got to bring some of it back.
And that's a huge thing.
People now take it for granted, but, you know, in the 90s, all of Russia's wealth, because everybody who got control of the assets or the money or the oil, whatever, people who got control of it, they knew they got it illegally in the 90s under Yeltsin, and they knew somebody else would come along at some point and steal it from what they stole.
So their only incentive was, steal as much as possible and wire everything out of the country.
And Yeltsin, I'm sorry, Putin did reverse that to some degree.
I mean, there's still, you know, there's still a lot of that going on, and it goes on here too, but a lot of the money has been repatriated into Russia, and you can see the place looks a lot better now.
But when you ask about the future of American relations, I mean, one thing I was thinking about before this interview started is, isn't it strange and interesting that in August of 2008 and September of 2008, we were literally talking about a new Cold War or possibly going to war with Russia.
And there was all this hysteria in the press, and McCain and Palin were talking about how, you know, basically discussing, and they were discussing in the neocon media, like, should we send troops?
Should we start a guerrilla war in Russia, et cetera, et cetera?
And you know, that was completely insane.
And if you tried to argue with people, they'd call you an appeaser in Munich and all this other crap.
But all it really took to stop all of this was just stop it.
Stop talking about it.
Turn the heat down.
There was no existential crisis for the West or for us.
There was some little spat, you know, where one petty dictator, Saukashvili of Georgia, invaded a tiny little enclave, and then Russia, you know, invaded back.
And all of a sudden, everyone was talking about Russia marching the Atlantic and watering the horses, you know, in Paris, in the fountains of Paris, and so on.
It was completely insane.
But I find it so interesting that all you have to do to pull back from the brink of war and, God knows, you know, nuclear holocaust, is just stop playing, stop pretending, stop playing that stupid game and focus on other things.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, if we were mortal enemies, it wouldn't have just evaporated an issue that big so quickly.
And you've got to wonder, like, you know, if we all of a sudden decided, well, maybe Iran is not an existential threat to America, and let's just stop raising a big fuss about it.
You know?
Yeah, that's a great example, too.
It really comes down to, I think, well, you know, the New York Times published something late in November of 08 and said, you know, maybe we kind of got that wrong about Russia started it.
And it turns out everybody else on earth who said otherwise was right.
Just not the American media.
That was sort of, I think, kind of a demarcation to that policy, like you're talking about.
That was a step on that road that, OK, we're backing off our wild and false claims.
And, you know, the consensus is we don't really want a conflict with the Russians right now, do we?
I think even Cheney.
I mean, Cheney and Bush, that was still during their last year there, and they didn't really do anything.
McCain said crazy things.
And thank God he didn't get the power, because who knows what would happen if he had won.
I know.
I know.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I mean, I think Cheney did everything he could to kind of encourage Saakashvili to do that little invasion.
It's just that Cheney always thinks every invasion is a bold move and it's going to be a cakewalk and things will turn out perfectly.
And, you know, he never looked in the rearview mirror to see just the, you know, the destruction and disasters that these helped cause.
But I think he definitely encouraged Saakashvili to think that, you know, everything would go dandy, even though everything, I mean, you know, Afghanistan went terrible, Iraq is just a catastrophe.
Cheney encouraged, as far as I know, he encouraged the Israelis to go after Hezbollah.
And then the Israelis got their asses handed to them in 2006.
Like, you know, taking advice from Cheney, I mean, you may as well just blow your brains out and save yourself some time.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I guess, you know, we got to be thankful that on this one, either he didn't get to make the call or it was Bush or somebody that flinched because Vladimir Putin drew a line and said, no, man, and sent troops in and smashed the Georgian army.
And you know, in other words, in, you know, playground terms, he bucked up to George Bush and said, what?
And Bush said, oh, nothing.
And then that was the end of that, because, I mean, and this is really where you get to the danger of this empire.
It's a great welfare program for Lockheed shareholders and whatever.
But we really were having a border dispute with the Russians in the Caucasus Mountains.
And that ain't because the Caucasus Mountains are in America anywhere.
That's because America is far away from home, engaging in things that are, that, I mean, as we saw here, they even recognize we don't really have an interest in who rules South Ossetia, do we?
No, we don't.
Let's be quiet.
Yeah, I know.
And I think it was a really painful, I mean, I think the initial hysterical reaction was because it was the first time that these crazy idiots realized the limit of American power and actually how much they depleted American power, geopolitical power and so on, through all of these wars and all this expansion of the empire and the debt and so on.
And they realized, you know, because in the past, America would have, I mean, eight years earlier or something, Bush might have been able to shake his dick and maybe, you know, maybe Putin would have backed off somewhat.
But Putin called our bluff.
He understood, I think he, first of all, this was a much more important issue for them because they're actually, you know, it's on their border and they're actually citizens of Russia who are being slaughtered and overrun.
But also, you know, Putin understood that we were weakened and that's the result, that's what these guys have done.
And so, you know, he called our bluff and now the whole world kind of figured out, if they hadn't already, that America had kind of, you know, committed half suicide over the last couple of decades since the Cold War by trying to run this insane empire that doesn't benefit, you know, it benefits maybe 1-5% of this population, but to the detriment of the rest of us.
Yeah.
Well, and it's funny too, this whole time for a decade straight, we've been taking the role of the Soviet Union, incorporating all the Warsaw Pact states and the former Soviet republics into NATO and launching a war of permanent occupation in Afghanistan.
Even with our own red domino theory about how it's going to, you know, our philosophy is going to spread like a contagion across the Middle East as we implant it and whatever.
And here we are, headed right toward the same fate as the Soviet Union circa 1990-91.
And anybody can see it coming, like the worst train wreck, at some point our ruble is going to be worth nothing and we're going to starve and our empire will finally end the same way theirs did.
If we're lucky, I guess, no one will nuke us.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, I could see this train wreck coming from so far away and I used to write about it and bitch about it and complain about it, you know, in articles and to fellow journalists and so on.
And it's just like one of these disasters, you see, it's so obvious that it's going to be coming.
And, you know, I think what happened was there were a couple of events that just made, you know, idiots with initiatives.
You know, the Russians say there's nothing worse than an idiot with initiatives, which is kind of Bush and Wolfowitz and these guys, Cheney.
But I think, you know, two major events happened that really made them think that they existed outside of, I don't know, the laws of history.
And the first one was the way that communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, you know, without us having to fire a shot like that.
These guys didn't look at it like it was some kind of victory for the people or, you know, it was a local, you know, domestic uprising and overthrow and so on because of a totally decayed, decrepit and evil system.
They looked at it as our triumph.
We did it and we can do anything and everybody wants to be us and like us.
And then the second thing, I think, was the first Gulf War because, you know, in purely military terms, it went off like everybody had been skittish after Vietnam.
The nice thing about losing a war is it makes you kind of smarter and take things a little more seriously the next time around.
But in the first Gulf War, you know, it went off militarily so much easier than I think a lot of people had worried about that suddenly they thought, hey, wait a minute, why were we worrying?
In fact, I think we can do a lot more.
And that victory really brought out the very, very worst in this country, that we can win any war without any consequences to us and that our ideas are, you know, are the end of history and our civilization is the end of history.
And it's depressing, it's a shame, and hopefully people will start to, I don't know, very seriously start proposing a totally different vision of what this country should be and what its mission is and what patriotism is and so on, rather than an empire like a Wall Street backed imperial, you know, machine.
Yeah.
Well, it sounds like you guys are going to have to do a coup and seize all the TV networks or something for that to get through.
I guess we'll just go broke.
But yeah, you know, I mean, this is really my thing, too.
And we don't have to agree all about economics because we can agree about 70% and it's good enough.
But I think the real question is if and maybe this is assuming a pretty big premise, but if indeed we are headed to a situation where the dollar breaks, where we have, you know, very high unemployment for a long time in a row and these people continuing to just steal trillions and trillions from us as we're trying to recover, you know, homelessness across the board and things like this, you know, that's when people start really asking themselves, which way do we go from here?
And it seems like our choices are either we go to Petraeus or some other strongman hero to save everything, or we get it through our thick skull that all we got to do is what we know we are supposed to be doing in the first place.
And and that actually all we did was just go off track with all this weird number one stuff, as you're just describing, that we could be a normal country in a normal time if we would just live that way.
It's OK.
Peace could save us.
Liberty could save us if we would just have a little bit of it instead of turning everything over to these monsters, you know?
Yeah, I know.
But unfortunately, what you said about the TV network and so on, I mean, it's too true.
I mean, try and talk sane talk, you know, on the news networks.
And first of all, they've become, you know, one network is sort of the mouthpiece of the Republican Party.
The other one is kind of the mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.
You know, the reasonable voices get either drowned out by the more hysterical ones or, you know, or the reasonable voices get smeared as, you know, either not patriotic, un-American, you know, or like racist or anti-Semitic, whatever.
There's always some way to smear it.
And you know, the problem is the people who are kind of, who are opinion makers, even though they've just failed over and over and over, they're kind of, they're so deeply entrenched, you know, in voicing opinions constantly on television and then even, you know, in the halls of power that I just, I don't know how easy it would be to just say, wait a minute, we just went off track, let's behave normally.
I think to counter these guys, something bigger needs to happen and some kind of bigger idea needs to be proposed.
Like, they need to be confronted a lot more vigorously and seriously than that, you know?
That's what I think.
I mean, they're really nasty, horrible, sleazy, corrupt, vicious people.
And they're all, they're all there.
They're all in league as far as I can tell.
Yeah.
Well, I'm totally with you on your description of them, like some alien force, this parasite that's just coming and ruining everything that's good.
I call them the state.
We can be more specific than that and include all the bankers and the executives at Lockheed and Raytheon and, you know, the rest of the, all the rich people on welfare.
That's the problem.
They're the parasite.
You know?
Yeah, it is.
But I mean, I'm all for, I have a gut problem, you know, with socialism, period, you know, like a lot of Americans, I think.
But where I identify more with the left and the right is just that, or let's say within with like libertarianism, I guess, is that, you know, libertarian idea is a great idea, but it's already been so manipulated and so twisted and co-opted that I'm just not, all I see is that it can always be, therefore, completely manipulated and twisted.
And so, you know, the current power structure and economic structure needs to be, you know, brought down with ideas from the left, which are more about fairness and justice and, you know, not just fixing all these goddamn rules to make sure that the rich stay rich and screw everybody else.
Sure.
Yeah.
Absolutely fair enough.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's absolutely fair enough.
And where we agree is on all the most important things and the two, of course, you know, being peace and the Bill of Rights, you know, and even on economics, we both, you know, not just we both, but real leftists and, and libertarians are perfectly agreed on at least half of it.
And you know, a lot of libertarians, like if you listen to Ron Paul talk, he's willing to concede all the social welfare type stuff to you for the time being, as long as we can focus on peace and the Bill of Rights and that kind of thing.
So I like to believe there's real space for realignment here with the best of the left, the right and the libertarians.
I mean, even when you got nice things to say about the tea partiers too, a lot of them are pissed off about a lot of the very same things, if even for somewhat different reasons than both of us, you know, so it is us versus them.
It is a class war.
It's the people who already have money using the state against the rest of us.
That's left, right and center and libertarian and everybody ought to be able to at least agree on the shape of the conflict, you know, it seems like.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's basically like fighting King George right now or it's like, you know, like what Belton did to the Congo a hundred years ago and King Leopold sent in his, you know, his colonial police and economic people and then just stripped the country raw and killed a bunch of people and took all the wealth and built mansions.
I mean, there's an entrenched elite right now that is just all about protecting itself and that's what the bailout was about, right?
I mean, they were defunded for a while and they were genuinely scared and the playing field was a lot more level than anything they were used to for a few months before they got all the trillions back, you know, taking it from us and had, you know, had we not done that bailout, we could have, and again, it was just another lost opportunity.
We really could have realigned this country and made it a lot more sane and working for more people.
Right, like I've been praying for Citigroup to go out of business for decades, ever since I first learned about Citibank being bought by John Rockefeller's brother William back in 1913 or 10, 12.
I mean, man, that's all we need is a free market to destroy Citigroup.
Oh well.
I agree.
You know, they may, they are destroyed, you know, even all these, all these hundreds of billions that they're getting, I'm not quite sure it's enough.
I think it's, well, we'll see, but it seems also a possibility that it's just some kind of structure that is still there to just funnel money to the main investors, you know, the Saudi prince and the Americans, whoever else is like deeply invested or owns, you know, or who Citibank owes money to.
But, but, you know, the whole structure is still there, the same structure.
I mean, you know, last thing I want to say, the problem with these guys, we were talking about this today and how these people who fail over and over keep, keep rising up and getting more powerful and more control over our lives.
And that just shows that we really are under the thumb of, it's like an aristocracy.
I mean, that was the difference between what America, America's founding fathers, you know, sort of envisioned for this country and, and old Europe.
This is supposed to be a place where it was supposed to be a meritocracy where people's talents would, you know, the more talented you were, you get rewarded for that.
You'd rise up based on how you worked and so on.
And they didn't want to live in a rigid system where it was all about what family you were born into or what, you know, corrupt privilege you happen to get.
And you know, granted, it's, you know, it's hard to make that work in a pure way, but there's a, there's a, you know, a scale here and we are way on the King George end of the scale these days.
I mean, if you look at anything, whether it's in the media or in the business world or so on there's, there's, there's not much social mobility.
I mean, it's the sons and daughters of powerful media people are now themselves powerful media people, sons and daughters of, you know, Wall Street bankers or CEOs or whatever.
They're now also the Wall Street bankers and CEOs.
And there are fewer and fewer good jobs out there and more and more, they're just taken up by sons and daughters and sons-in-laws and daughters-in-laws of this entrenched elite.
And in that sense, yeah, it really is a class war.
Yeah.
Well, and I think, again, the way you put it is great and it really helps clarify the issue and, and gives us something to realign around.
And I, you know, I think what you just said is for any normal American who doesn't even maybe even know what liberal and conservative mean or care really, or whatever, everybody can agree with what you just said.
Of course, what America is supposed to be about is you achieve well, you achieve good things if you are the one who, who earns your own reward, not just, you know, some old world kleptocracy and all that kind of thing.
Hell, our grandparents are the people who fled wherever they were at, were brave enough to get on a boat and come over here to try to start a new life in the first place.
You know, we all know that, no matter what you call yourself.
Yeah, I know.
And that's all been just so, just, you know, incredibly perverted in an accelerated way in the last 30 years, especially, and it's just, it's just a damn shame.
And I think, you know, it all goes hand in hand with, with the, with this, with this crazy empire that wasn't my idea, it wasn't your idea, you know, it was a handful of out-to-lunch, well-connected idiot ideas, and those ideas have consequences, and they're terrible consequences for us.
Yeah, so we got to basically, we got to overthrow this elite and subject them to real, you know, real meritocracy tests.
I mean, do they deserve to be there, or are they just there because, you know, their dad was somebody, or their mom was somebody?
You know, this country, it can't really become dynamic and smart again until we get rid of these people, or make them accountable for their failure.
Right on.
Well, you're certainly doing your part, everybody go check out The Exiled, it's exiledonline.com, and it's not just Mark Ames, but also The War Nerd, and Yasha Levine, and all kinds of great opinion articles there for you to read, and I really appreciate your time on the show today, Mark.
It's great stuff.
Thanks for having me on, Scott, it's always a pleasure.
