Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, thanks a lot for tuning in to the show today.
I should mention, I guess, I never do, that we're here every Monday through Friday from 11 to 1 Texas time.
Streaming live at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And the podcasts of the interview archives are at antiwar.com slash radio.
But if you want to podcast the whole show, go to chaosradioaustin.org and look for the archives there.
Introducing today's guest, it's Will Grigg.
He's the author of the excellent, indispensable Liberty in Eclipse, which you have to run out and get.
And writes the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
He's the author of that introduction to Philip Drew Administrator, A Story of Tomorrow, which I just read to you.
And as I've always told people on the radio or off, you've got to get Philip Drew, but you've got to get the purple one with the big Colonel Edward Mandelhouse eyes over the White House.
And the 1998 foreword by William Norman Grigg that explains the importance.
And so isn't that cool?
If you want, we can start the conversation there.
First of all, hi, Will.
How are you?
Welcome to the show.
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me on your program again.
I'm doing great.
It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
Do you feel like talking about Philip Drew?
Isn't that such an important story that the Democrats are actually the fascists?
I think that it's an important part of the story and one that's almost entirely neglected by most people who analyze what's going on with our political cartel.
If you understand Philip Drew, if you understand the malign ambitions that were inscribed in that really embarrassingly underwritten novel in terms of the characterizations and plot and so forth, it was a pretty good example of a literary art form that was invoked for the later part of the 19th, early part of the 20th century where people would write these manifestos in the form of novels.
And the plots and characterizations were deliberately kept thin so the people could pontificate about their grand schemes for rebuilding humanity.
One of the most notorious examples would be Bellamy's Looking Backward.
That was probably the most influential one in terms of creating a mass political movement.
But Philip Drew is more influential in the sense that it captured the imagination of those who aspired to be part of the commanding elite of our culture and of our political system.
And if you understand the fundamental mechanisms described in Philip Drew and the way that those ambitions require the gaming of the political system so that we really don't have a choice as an electorate, we're given two different flavors of corporate socialism and that the one that was in power at the time, that of Woodrow Wilson and his Democrat party, was really the forerunner of what we would now call fascism, that particular political and economic model, then a lot of what's happened in the intervening decades makes perfect sense.
For instance, if you read Philip Drew and then read a little bit about what Carol Quigley had to say about the people who were inspired by Philip Drew in his Tragedy and Hope talking about this self-replicating, semi-submerged, ruling elite or power elite.
If you understand those elements of what's happened and if you can see how those mechanisms have been replicated and they've transmitted their authority through the intervening decades, then the fact that Mr. Obama is surrounding himself with names off the same Rolodex of warmongering corporate socialists wouldn't surprise you at all.
Irrespective of the fact that Mr. Obama, who comes to office drenched in the messianic magnificence of his benign intentions, supposedly is going to be bringing about a significant change in the way we're governed, that change will simply represent an acceleration of the same policies, of the same priorities, of the commanding elite that propelled him into office.
And if you read these books, if you read Philip Drew, if you read at least some of Quigley, because Tragedy and Hope's a rather daunting prospect, 1,400 pages or so.
It's got a great index, though.
Yeah, a great, wonderful index, very helpful.
But if you read enough, you get a praxis of Tragedy and Hope, for instance.
If you just understand some of the elements of what we're discussing this morning so far, you'll end up understanding how it is that time after time we end up getting pretty much the same menu.
It doesn't really matter what it's being described for our benefit as we go into the voting booths and as we align ourselves behind these different candidates.
You just see basically the same constellation of power.
And it's worked to such an extent now that our country is completely unrecognizable from the perspective, I contend, of what our founding fathers had intended to create.
I think that if they had the ability to see our contemporary society, our contemporary system, they would see it as something utterly alien to their ambitions to have a loosely confederated, constitutionally governed free republic.
And it's worked so well that we're confronting the prospect right now of a descent into unalloyed tyranny and absolutely undisguised bankruptcy.
These people have been wildly successful in destroying the architecture of what they inherited.
Well, you know, this introduction as you wrote it, it was in 1998.
Yeah.
And a lot has happened since 1998.
And I think, and I'm not really definite about this, I always carry around a lot of question marks.
It seems to me that what you talk about here when you refer to kind of the permanent establishment as represented, particularly in foreign policy, as represented by the Council on Foreign Relations and the fact that every administration seems to be, or at least all the ministers and all the highest level cabinet appointees and everything seem to all share in common a lot of it.
Well, they have the consensus, if not conspiracy, they all agree.
And that's where they all get together to agree in a sense, you know, and, you know, announce and debate, you know, in foreign affairs how things ought to be on the highest levels and that sort of thing.
But since then there's really been, has there not, the rise of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the American Enterprise Institute.
And what, you know, Jacob Hilbron wrote about how these neocons always hated the WASPs and hated the establishment and wanted to set up their own parallel establishment.
And it seems like at least for a time in the first Bush administration, a group of people were running things who, you know, I guess in a sense there really was a choice between Bush and Gore in 2000 in the sense that with one you would have got the realists, with the other we got the neoconservatives, which, or I don't know, I'm just rambling now, but how do you think that the neoconservative movement fits in within the larger, at least ideological framework of, you know, modern day FDR legacy Democrat politics?
Well, you used a really interesting expression.
Scott, you and I have discussed this before a number of years ago.
I believe in 2003 or 2004 we actually had a conversation about the fact that under the aegis of Dick Cheney and his office there seemed to be new and rather potent group coalescing that represented something of a more extreme version of interventionist foreign policy hawkishness.
Well, it really was at the expense of the UN, at the expense of so-called collective security.
Yeah, I mean, it seemed that they were detracting from the established and sort of settled architecture of power and they were moving out as sort of a tangent.
The thing is, you used an interesting expression just a second ago.
You said they were sort of parallel institutions.
And the thing that I find remarkable is that you don't find any perpendicular institutions, if you will, that is to say institutions that represent a perspective that is wildly at variance with this established consensus.
Even the neocons, they're most demented, seem to represent sort of a, I hate to use the expression because it has an unfortunate connotation, sort of an extra chromosome version of the established foreign policy in Washington.
It's always been interventionist.
The foreign policy consensus in Washington has always mandated that we be involved in the affairs of other countries, that we involve ourselves with what we're pleased to call allies, but actually are more satraps.
They're more like they're subcontractors than people who would be looked upon by Washington as equals in any sense.
They always talk about coalitions that work internationally, work through multilateral organizations and so forth.
The difference with the neocons is that they wanted to assert the primacy of Washington much more forcefully and much more obviously.
And it didn't really start with Cheney and his clack either.
You can remember the unspeakable Madeleine Albright about a decade ago talking about how we're the indispensable nation.
We see farther.
We have greater insight.
We have more power.
We should throw our weight around a little bit more assertively because without us, the world really is inconsequential.
It's that same self-worshipping version of American exceptionalism that the neocons sort of played into as they were setting up their little satellite institutions.
What I'm thinking is happening right now, because the neocons tend to be protean, they don't really have any fixed set of loyalties or attachments beyond their own craving for power, is that they will adapt whatever plumage is necessary in order to blend in with the landscape.
Now that Obama's in power, you can actually feel sort of a gale force change in the suck-up wind in Washington as a lot of these people who two or three months ago were talking about Obama as if he were a covert jihadist are now talking about him as if perhaps, dare we hope, that he might emerge as sort of a Kennedy-style muscular interventionist.
And so I think what's going to happen is that the neocons are going to change their feathers and try to come out as part of the Obama coalition now because if you take a look at the fact that Obama's appointing Madam Hillary as the Secretary of State, she has got a lot of clout with a lot of the neocons in Washington because she and the people that she'd bring in her train are very much in this tradition of armed, bloody-handed dugoutism.
And so I think that that would probably dictate something of a change in the correlation of forces there where the neocons would go back to their natural home, which is the Democratic Party.
You saw that with the first Clinton administration.
Really, Obama's presiding over something of a Clinton restoration.
If you take a look at the people who are manning particularly the foreign policy posts in his administration, I'm thinking of a couple of people who were part of the commentary crowd back in the 1990s, early 90s, who were part of the Bush administration, who in 1992 very prominently changed their allegiance to Clinton just a couple of months before he was elected because by, I don't know, July or August of that year, it was pretty clear that the first Bush was going to get pasted at the polls.
And they ended up gravitating toward Clinton, and then they conspicuously changed their colors again in 1998 or 1999 and threw their weight behind first McCain, some of them, and then a lot of them behind Bush all the way.
So one of the advantages here of being people with no settled principles and no compunctions at all is that, like Taloran, you don't have any real difficulty changing your allegiance to suit your necessity.
Taloran was the one who famously said that treason is just a matter of dates.
I mean, as far as these people are concerned, they can change their allegiance at the drop of a hat if necessary in order to retain their access to power.
So I think what's happening is that the sort of semi-permanent or even permanent Washington establishment now is going to reassert its power more vividly.
You're probably going to see a new prestige being led to all these institutions of multilateral power that were sort of ignored, not entirely, but sort of ignored during the Bush reign.
Already you see that Obama is becoming a little bit more friendly toward some elements of the U.N. system that were really shouldered aside by the Bush administration, such as all the nonsense having to do with global climate change and whatnot.
I suspect that because he's always been more of a soft power interventionist than John McCain was, that you're probably going to see the U.N. probably come fairly close to the center of his foreign policy again, which is not something I look forward to.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny.
It takes the least public route or public kind of denunciation of the neoconservatives in the election of Barack Obama to make you remember just how murderous these so-called realists are.
And the reason that they call them the realists is because they don't care how many people die.
They just got to do what they got to do.
And you think of, like, Christopher Hitchens' movie, The Trials of Henry Kissinger.
Hitchens has adopted this neoconservative, morality-based foreign policy.
When people say, isn't this imperialism that you're supporting in invading Iraq?
His answer to that, I've heard him answer before, let me tell you about imperialism in Iraq and what America's been doing in supporting Saddam Hussein and intervening this whole time.
Now we have to make it right, he says, or whatever.
But all of this is contra Kissinger, contra the Brent Scowcroft model of, well, yeah, let them invade East Timor and kill everybody, or let's prolong the Vietnam War an extra ten years just to get Nixon elected, or whatever it is.
Exactly.
I mean, you've got basically the polls being defined by the realists on the one hand who are people with absolutely no capacity for shame or no capacity for decent remorse over actions that kill hundreds of thousands or more.
And on the other hand, you've got the crusading moralists who believe that by killing hundreds of thousands or more, they're offering some kind of a consecrated sacrifice for the greater good.
And that's pretty much the way that the spectrum has been defined now in foreign policy terms, which is why, once again, it would have been interesting if we would have seen the emergence of these, to use the awkward metaphor, perpendicular institutions that would shoot off at a tangent from the established consensus rather than running parallel and offering just varieties on the same themes of interventionist politics in Washington.
And it's really interesting to me, once again, to see how in the person of Barack Obama, who's somebody who's got one really good skill, and it was a neocon who pointed this out, ironically.
It was Charles Krauthammer who pointed this out.
Barack Obama's one defining skill is that of working his own autobiography.
He's been developing a product and marketing that product, and that is himself.
And when you've got somebody in his mid-40s who's written not one but two autobiographies, you've got to wonder, what on earth have you done that's so consequential that merits two autobiographies?
So by that time, of course, he was a first-term senator in Illinois, which, of course, on the face of things wouldn't seem to suggest that he's done anything noteworthy enough to merit so much as one autobiography.
But the thing that Barack Obama has done is that he has managed to brand himself indelibly as a peace candidate and a change candidate.
Most of the people, I believe, in the coalition that created the appearance of a groundswell, the grassroots for Barack Obama, were attracted to his campaign because of the promise of change as specifically applied to foreign policy, most notably the Iraq War.
And Mr. Obama has not been anything like a peace candidate when it comes to Iraq or Iran or Pakistan or even Russia.
He's managed somehow to convey to a large number of people, many of whom are quite intelligent and rather observant of contemporary affairs, that he would make good on what a lot of the neocons' constituents find to be the biggest threat that his candidacy supposedly posed, which is to say he would withdraw from Iraq immediately, that he would sit down with Iran, the leaders of Iran and Pakistan and other nations of that sort, North Korea among them, and try to work out some kind of a modus vivendi that doesn't involve protracted and very expensive military confrontation.
There's nothing about Barack Obama's record that suggests that he would in any way be a legitimate vessel for those aspirations, but nonetheless he's managed to brand himself as that type of a candidate.
And already there are some rumblings, I'm happy to report, in the principled left.
Jeremy Scahill, for instance, in The Nation magazine wrote a very lengthy article talking about the foreign policy brain trust of the Obama administration as it's shaping up, and a number of other people from The Nation and a couple of people who write for Salon have pointed out that they're already growing disillusioned over the fact that he seems to be staffing his ranks with a combination of the thuggish realists and the demented moral interventionists, and the result would be that you're not going to have any notable changes in the foreign policy, and isn't that what Quigley promised in Tragedy and Hope?
That Obama's out every four years or eight years with no dramatic or sudden shifts in the fundamental direction of public policy.
You know I love that quote so much, he actually provides the ironic quotes for throw those rascals out.
Yeah, exactly.
Like isn't that just silly that, yeah, here's what will make people think that they can have a change by electing one party over the other every once in a while.
Exactly.
It's really kind of shameful to me that that still works on people, you know what I mean?
Well I think that one of the real potential changes that we're likely to see, given the fact that the financial architecture of the system is collapsing so quickly, and that has a way of focusing people's minds in a way that perhaps even foreign war doesn't, is that people are finally going to, at least some element of the population that's educable, will finally come to the realization that they have been so completely and thoroughly game for so many generations, and they're going to realize that it's not really a question of which party label, or what the television commercials would suggest about a given candidate that they should be paying attention to, and already you're hearing out in the hinterlands once again of the Democratic Party in particular, this very useful sense of disillusionment here, that there's something so tenacious about the hold that this permanent establishment has on the leadership of both parties, that they really have to start thinking outside the paradigm that we've been given about the two-party system now for a number of generations.
Chances are they'll discover the truth of it, we'll be willing to act on it, just as it becomes too late.
Yeah, probably.
It's too unproductive about the problem.
Although, as you say, I think with the appointments of all these people so quickly, this guy that they're talking about for National Security Advisor was a John McCain supporter, the former Marine General Jim Jones, and they want to keep Robert Gates at defense, and I don't know why they keep teasing us with that, they ought to just announce it one way or another.
But it's happening so fast, it's almost like Hurricane Katrina, where Karl Rove and his minions couldn't write a better script for how this is to be covered in time, to stop Shepard Smith from crying on TV and saying, oh my God, look what's happening, or whatever.
And so the narrative has kind of gotten away from Obama already.
The people who are paying attention, anyway, are looking at his appointments, and some of them are bending over backwards to make excuses, but already their spines have got to be getting sore, you know?
Oh, yeah.
By the way, I just wanted to add real quick, too, only because it's extra funny, when you talk about the packaging of Obama, I'm sure you saw this, the quote in Newsweek where they did their little mini-book about the campaigns, where Obama would joke with his staffers about that cellophane-wrapped, packaged Obama character, and he would say, this Obama guy, he's talking about himself, this Obama sounds like a nice guy.
I wonder if he really exists.
Exactly.
It's almost as if he existed.
This campaign that we just went through, that he, meaning the real Barack Obama, exists as sort of a meta-campaign level from the campaign he just ran.
I mean, it's almost like sort of this inverse Truman Show type thing, where the campaign was sort of a reality show based on the actual characters that are now being installed in power.
I mean, just about any presidential campaign or any significant political campaign is an artifact that's that cynically constructed.
The thing about what's been going on the last week or so with Obama that I find very ominous is the way that they're trying to find some way of confounding his character, that is to say the made-for-public-consumption character, the made-for-television Obama, with the holiest figure in American political iconography, and that's Abraham Lincoln.
There is this line from this movie, 2010, The Year We Made Contact, which was a science fiction movie made in 1984, that projected a conflict between, among other things, a conflict between the United States and resurgent Russia and Latin America.
And at the point where there's this crisis about to erupt, of a war between the U.S. and Russia in Honduras or someplace, the President of the United States goes to address a joint session of Congress and is reported to one of the characters in the show by the President's National Security Advisor.
He said, it was just a scary thing.
I don't know what was scarier, the President's speech or the way the Congress reacted to it.
And then he paused for effect and he said, the President invoked Lincoln.
When they're going to get us in trouble, they always use Lincoln.
And that's exactly what's going on right now.
That's how they justified going around habeas corpus right after September 11th.
Lincoln did it.
Even in TV shows.
They did that TV show where they were trying to set us up for a Hillary presidency, remember, with the woman president a few years back?
Oh yeah, with Geeta Davis, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
And I think that was one of the lines in there too, was Lincoln did it, and it was using the military against Americans.
I think pot growers in Kentucky are some stupid thing in this show.
That actually sounds like something very plausible today.
But with respect to the Lincoln precedent, I'm in the middle of reading a very fascinating book which talks about the way that the Lincoln political career, beginning when he was in Congress, was intertwined with the embryonic communist movement here in the United States.
That's not an original insight by any means.
Good grief.
There was an alternate history book, a series of alternate history novels that came out.
The first of which I think was called Guns of the South.
And one of the installments of that series, I can't remember the name of the author, he may come to me in a second.
He had posited an outcome of the Civil War that was different, where Abraham Lincoln was not assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, and that you ended up with a fissure between the Union side and the Confederacy, and Abraham Lincoln ended up living until he was full of years, and his last two or three decades were spent as an organizer and speaker on behalf of the American Communist Party.
And a lot of people would consider that to be sort of a lazy and untutored pejorative characterization of Lincoln, but the fact is when Lincoln was in Congress in 1848, he was aware of the rebellion that took place in Germany and Hungary and some other places in Europe where the prototype communist movement was trying to overthrow a number of kingdoms of that era and install socialist governments.
He had an uprising in France of that sort as well that took place in 1848, and when Lincoln was aware of what was going on, he spoke very fondly of it.
It was James McPherson who pointed to that in one of his treatments of Lincoln's presidency.
And then the people who came over and ended up involved in the formation of the Republican Party in Ripon, Wisconsin, were Germans who were emigres from the 1848 revolution.
They were part of the 1848 diaspora, and a lot of them ended up becoming the formers of the Republican Party, and they supported John Fremont's candidacy in 1856.
Some of them went on to lead various army units in the war between the states.
Among them, very conspicuously, is Carl Schurz, who is somebody I've written about quite a bit because as Secretary of the Interior, he's the very kind gentleman who created the Indian Reservation system.
He's a real piece of work, Mr. Schurz.
But the point I'm making here is that when earlier in the program, Scott, you mentioned the idea that the Republicans were the commies, the Democrats the fascists.
There's a lot of truth to that former characterization, too, because the people who created a lot of what ended up becoming the Republican Party were part of this 48er diaspora, these emigres from Europe who were active socialists and Marxists, and a lot of them ended up having conspicuous roles in the Lincoln war effort and the Lincoln cabinet.
And so you're really sort of coming back to type now when you have, in the person of George W. Bush, this individual who himself invoked Lincoln right after 9-11 at the National Cathedral.
He had the original version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which I think is a repellent song.
He had the original version sung where it talked about how as Christ died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.
That was the original version of that anthem.
And now in the waning days of his very destructive reign, Mr. Bush is presiding over the largest redistribution of wealth in human history in order to bail out his banker buddies and the other corporatist parasites who were sort of arrayed as part of the machinery of power in Washington.
This has never happened before in human history where a government of any significant size has pledged one half of its gross domestic product in order to bail out politically connected, hopelessly corrupt banking elites.
But if you understand that this is the Republican Party acting faithfully to its genotype, having been founded and brought to power by a coalition of German socialists on the one hand and very politically connected banker-connected elites on the other, like Abraham Lincoln being a very successful corporate lawyer before he became president, then none of this would really surprise you.
They're just being faithful to their genes.
Right.
And see, this is the thing.
When you throw around communism and Marxism and fascism and all these terms, people get confused, and that's kind of the point.
To get them confused in order to help straighten them out again is the way I look at it.
So the thing is, when you talk about the formation of the Republican Party with a lot of these revolutionary types in the background at that time, most people don't even know the name of a single president between Lincoln and TR because the presidents of America between Lincoln and TR were Rockefeller and Morgan.
And what really happened was that the Morgan guys, the way I read the history, was J.P. Morgan said to Thomas W. Lamont Sr., Lamont, you're in charge of this left-wing thing.
So Morgan's basically the Republican Party.
If we think about the Republican Party by the time of Theodore Roosevelt, this is the party of Wall Street.
There's no doubt about that.
But what you're pointing out is these bankers, they don't mind Marxism.
They don't want the government to redistribute all their wealth away toward the poor people.
Obviously we're not saying that.
We're saying what you're arguing really is that therefore that system of the government's control over economic life in order to take our money and give it to the people who are already rich.
Communism for them.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
Communism is a wonderful way of centralizing political control and centralizing the exercise of force.
And it's also a terrifically efficient way of wrecking an economy by centralizing control over the economy to the benefit of those who exercise that power.
I mean the promise that is made by those who aggregate power in the central government this way is that eventually through some mechanism that they're not all that keen to explain this mechanism of control and coercion and centralization will magically wither away and then we will all return to some state of prelapsarian splendor where we don't really have to worry about working so much and we'll be able to keep the value of what we earn.
I don't know how this is supposed to take place.
It never has, never will, given the permanent realities of human nature.
But if you understand that socialism slash communism is simply about centralizing and controlling the wealth rather than redistributing it to the benefit of the poor then it makes perfect sense that you would see historic entente between the bankers and the Bolsheviks.
I mean you've probably seen, no doubt you've seen, you probably read on your blog that famous cartoon from the early 20th century of Rockefeller greeting Karl Marx on Wall Street.
This squalid, relevant little character, perfect caricature of Karl Marx this bristling little ball of arrogance and bile being surrounded by these sycophantic lawyers among them of course Rockefeller represented in caricature right at the front ranks.
And I think T.R. is there with him too.
T.R. is with him of course which is entirely appropriate.
But that of course is a much more suitable illustration.
Oh wait, don't skip the caption.
The caption is something along the lines, is it what?
Pleased to meet you?
Yeah, something along the lines of that.
I forget.
I've got Jekyll Island here.
Hang on.
There, I'll flip right to it.
I know it's at the beginning here.
Oh cool, this is my autographed copy too.
Thanks Ed.
Oh cool.
Let me see here.
Where is that cartoon?
It's after the breakfast and the acknowledgements.
Oh man, was it not in the paperback?
What happened?
Well, alright.
We'll have to just edit that part out of the podcast man.
Oh, that's alright.
No, I'm just kidding.
We'll leave it.
But it's in the hardback version of Jekyll Island.
If you run out and get that everybody.
Yeah.
I'm sure you'll appreciate this wonderful book.
But the thing is that once again, it's a really good illustration of the real relationship that exists here.
And I don't know if you had a chance yet to read DiLorenzo's most recent book, Hamilton's Curse.
No, I haven't read that yet.
But I have that in my notes for talking about.
Because I saw where you had written a great little piece about Aaron Burr shooting Alexander Hamilton in the Rose of the Heart.
Yeah, two decades too.
Actually, yeah, he shot him in the upper left chest, if I remember correctly.
That's a pretty good shot.
Yeah, it was.
You know, there's some controversy about that too, because apparently Hamilton had the first shot and he pulled his shot.
In other words, he didn't try to kill Burr, and Burr had the second shot and he just hopped off and shot Hamilton.
Whatever.
He was acting for the benefit of everybody else.
It was a sort of collective self-defense death penalty type thing.
Yeah, but it was about two decades too late, because by that time, of course, Hamilton had already had his influence in his writings and the embryonic so-called American system that he set up, which was one in which the purpose of the financial system was to serve the nation.
Oh, the caption is, delighted.
That's right, delighted to meet you.
Delighted.
Delighted.
Yeah, and there's Theodore Roosevelt and Perkins and Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, John Ryan of National City Bank.
Okay, I'm sorry.
That's all right.
That's entirely appropriate.
But once again, Hamilton's whole idea was to set up a financial system that would work to the benefit of the government, first of all, and then the bondholders on government debt.
And the whole system was supposed to be structured so that the money would be controlled centrally and the so-called improvements would be undertaken as a way of aggrandizing the power of government.
It wouldn't be merely the building of infrastructure and the creation, for instance, of canals, eventually railroad systems, which would come in after Hamilton's death and so forth.
And that's where Lincoln purchased his ticket to power was by acting as the chief attorney for the chief railroad at the time, the biggest in Illinois Central, which was very much a part of this government-aligned and government-subsystem.
But Hamilton perceived military and imperial undertakings in the same light that he perceived the system of improvements.
And it was all, of course, designed in order to expand the power of government, which he saw as being synonymous with the greatness of the country, would be the size and power of the government, and to enrich the bondholders.
And the thing that I found most telling in this wonderful book that de Lorenzo wrote was the description of the Whiskey Rebellion and the army that was put together to put down the rebels in western Pennsylvania.
This was a time, of course, when specie was scarce.
They didn't have gold or silver to speak of in that part of Pennsylvania.
The chief commodity that was being traded as money was grain, specifically grain being used as distilled into spirits.
So people were paying their debts using distilled spirits.
And Hamilton wanted to get a piece of that in order to fund his ambitions, and so he slapped an excise tax on whiskey.
And this didn't sit well with the farmers of Pennsylvania, and so every time some federal official would come by to moult them of their whiskey, he'd be treated to the proper decorative use of tar and feathers as a way of telling him what the people thought of this particular extraction.
Well, what happened is that Hamilton persuaded Washington to summon the militia, and a huge army was put together, much larger than the army that drove the Brits out of Yorktown, if you remember.
And at the head of this army marched George Washington, who was the only sitting U.S. president to lead an army into what we call battle, and there were no actual exchanges of gunfire involved in this particular battle, because Washington showing up was enough to disperse the movement.
But Hamilton was there at his side, and then they presided over this immense conscript army, the officers of which were representatives of the bond-holding creditor class.
In other words, you have the people out there making sure that they're going to get their money, and they're deploying this army of tax collectors in order to put down a rebellion in western Pennsylvania.
With no pretense about it whatsoever.
Exactly.
And the name Revenuers stuck to them for 150 years after that or something, too.
Yeah, you can still hear people, and I've got good friends in Pennsylvania, good friends from Pennsylvania, who still use that as one of their chief epithets, Revenuers.
And, you know, they're not just talking about people that are going after illicit moonshine stills or what have you, they're talking about anybody who's part of the tax-feeding class, and those are particularly involved in the direct extraction of wealth from the productive.
Hey, can I ask you something about Hamilton?
I saw this HBO thing about John Adams, and I just don't know the history of, you know, the last part of Adams' presidency like this, but the way they portrayed it in that HBO miniseries was that, you know, because Adams wasn't quite with Hamilton and the Federalists, he nominally was, but he was sort of his own guy.
It was really before the institutionalization of the two-party thing, or during it, I guess.
And anyway, so the Federalists had convinced him to raise an army in preparation for war with France, but he was doing everything he could to avoid it.
Hamilton had convinced him to make Washington the head of the army, but Washington was too old and eventually died, and then Hamilton made himself the head of the new national army in preparation for war with France, and at the last minute before the end of his presidency, they got word from Talleyrand, there's that guy again, that, okay, we're going to have peace, we're not going to have a war, and then Adams immediately disbanded the army to Hamilton's ultimate frustration when he was set to be the military, you know, wanting to take on this military role as the leader of the Continental Army.
That tracks very well with what DiLorenzo has to say about the subject.
He talks about Hamilton and his relationship with Adams.
He sort of vacillated between Adams and Jefferson, Hamilton did, although he was much more comfortable, obviously, with Adams.
Adams was having certain royalist tendencies that played out very tragically during his single term as president.
But DiLorenzo talks about the Alien and Sedition Acts and the other impositions that were made on the freedom of speech and political liberties as being measures that partook of Hamilton's perspective on the need for authoritarian government.
And DiLorenzo's opinion that there was a very close correspondence there between Hamilton and Adams and the creation of a lot of those measures and that they did represent Hamilton's view of how government should be operated.
And Hamilton, of course, was somebody who did have huge military aspirations, and to be candid about it, he had more than a little bit of military ability.
He distinguished himself in the War for Independence as an artilleryman.
He was somebody who performed with great valor and distinction.
I have to give him credit for that.
And I do think that one of the things that eventually led to his demise was that he was a man of personal courage.
He was not somebody who led from the rear.
He was not one of these soft-headed neocon laptop bombardiers, you know, your Jonah Goldberg types, who feel some kind of an illicit, prurient thrill at the spectacle of other men going out to kill and die.
I mean, this is somebody who was accustomed to leading from the front.
Whatever else you say about Hamilton, he was somebody who did have a certain ability in that respect.
But it was a very near-run thing there.
I mean, Hamilton was in charge of his own army.
He might have been able to accomplish that, which Aaron Burr, ironically enough, wanted to accomplish in a different realm, which was to make himself basically the Lord High Emperor of an entire country.
Right, because Burr wanted to go and invade and become the emperor of Mexico, right?
He basically was the same kind of a personality as Hamilton, I think.
It was ironic, well, inevitable, I guess, that those two eventually would throw down and only one would be left standing.
I read a great article by, it was in the Beastie Boys magazine, Grand Royal, called Aaron Burr, American Badass.
It was really good, too.
He could speak and read and write 17 languages or something.
A complete madman, mad scientist type.
Yeah, he was like a villain out of the Wild Wild West.
If you remember that television show from the 60s with James West and Artemis Gordon, they were sort of like an anachronistic James Bond setting, where they worked for the Secret Service.
They were always running into these people in the mid-19th century, or actually post-Civil War America, where they were at the cusp of developing the atom bomb or some such nonsense.
You know, to transplant Aaron Burr a couple of decades forward in history, he would have been a suitable villain for those two.
But with respect to Hamilton and his military career, the one point that de Lorenzo made very indelibly for me, among others, I should say, I mean, he made a number of very, very plangent and impressive points about how Hamilton and his ambitions are what we're living under.
We're living under Hamilton's template for authoritarian government.
Since 1913 in particular, he refers to the year 1913, the Honest and Rebellious 1913 as the Hamiltonian Revolution, where we get the Federal Reserve.
The Senate is effectively abolished.
We end up with the 16th Amendment, the permanent income tax, all of this.
But when you're talking about the Whiskey Rebellion and Alexander Hamilton's treatment of those who rebelled against his tax system, that's something I found probably the most piquant and most useful observation about the fundamental nature of the guy.
He drove these people through the snow, yet old men and these pathetic farmers who were shoeless and bedraggled like the troops of Valley Forge, drove them through the snow of Pennsylvania in the winter after the rebellion was put down.
Then he put them in what would be considered to be, I think, sort of a prototype of Gitmo, where they were run through these farcical trials, and they were put to extreme duress in order to manufacture evidence against Hamilton's political enemies.
And the penalty for leaving this gulag they were penned up in was summary beheading, according to the administrator of that jail.
That's something that Lorenzo points out that I never read before, was that Hamilton, while he did not specifically prescribe that penalty, he didn't do anything to mitigate it or to repeal it.
It was certainly okay with him.
The penalty for escaping this POW camp would have been summary beheading.
And then once he'd found a number of people he was willing to indict, Hamilton ordered the presiding judge to find them guilty and have them subject to immediate execution by firing squad.
And it was Washington who commuted the sentences of all of them.
Actually, I think he pardoned all of the two that commuted the sentence of the two who were convicted.
And so none of them actually ended up facing the firing squad or facing long prison terms in spite of what they suffered.
But it was the scope of Hamilton's malign ambitions here and the simple cruelty of the man that I think really embodies the system, or rather is embodied by the system that we're living under right now.
I mean, it was Madison who said of Hamilton that he wanted to have a country that was union held together by armed tax collectors.
Isn't that what we're living under right now?
Armed tax collectors who are molting us for the benefit of politically connected billionaires.
It's the most repulsive thing.
But now let's take it back then to whether this is, whether, well, and you can go both ways on it.
That's the irony of the thing or whatever.
But, I mean, let's try to trace this back to whether we really are talking about movements of the right or the left.
I mean, Hamilton was a reactionary, counter-revolutionary conservative.
And he passed on his conservative legacy through Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln, as I've learned in other works by DiLorenzo.
He really traces through the Henry Clay era and all that.
And so the Republicans, you know, the Federalists, the Whigs, then the Republicans basically more or less continuity through those parties.
The Democrats of Jefferson always on the other side ever since, you know, the very first generation of the constitutional era, you know.
But so I guess, you know, the thing is this.
Like, for example, when you talk about Lincoln supported the overthrows of kings and so forth in Europe, pretty much anybody would, whether they were a right-winger or a left-winger conservative or a progressive liberal socialist type in America at that point, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't want to get too, I want to use the right and the left as the opposites and the confusion to set it straight, but I don't want to just make it more confusing.
I mean, these people are ultimately conservatives, aren't they?
The progressives?
The Lincoln types?
I think with respect to the idea of doing away with the kings and emperors and other, the other nobility of the sort, the title nobility and the whole system of feudalism that existed in Europe at the time, most Americans probably would have supported that sentimentally, if not to the extent of wanting to implicate our country in any specific movement for independence.
I think that the difference between, for instance, a Lincoln in 1848 applauding the communist upheaval in Europe and the sentiments of the Americans with respect to the move for Greek independence, the independence of the Christian Greeks from the Ottoman Turks in the 1820s, the one that, that was the movement that John Quincy Adams warned us against, saying, yeah, we may be sentimentally implicated in what's going on there, but we really have no cause to get our country embroiled in that conflict, is that in the case of what was going on in Greece, I mean, you've got people who seem to be battling for independence under premises that most Americans would relate to immediately.
I mean, most Americans would not be dialectical materialists.
Most Americans would not be people who believe that it's necessary to start the world anew the way that the Jacobins did and that their heirs in 1848 would claim but rather they wanted to restore something that had been taken from them that they understood in terms of a legacy that was tangible.
I mean, the whole purpose of the battle for American independence was not to create something completely new ex nihilo.
It was to restore their ancient rights as Englishmen.
And so the idea that the Greek Christian patriots battling against the Turks were trying to recover their identity as Greeks who believed in the Christian faith I think that's something that would resonate with the conservative element of the American population at the time, whereas Lincoln was embracing something that was completely different.
Lincoln himself was, I believe, it's been well established, was an atheist.
You can take that for what it was.
If you believe that he was noble, that doesn't by that fact mean he was ignoble.
But the fact is that he was somebody who came out of a completely different tradition than that which John Quincy Adams was addressing in that famous Independence Day speech, and I believe it was 1821.
We don't go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
What I'm trying to say is you're dealing with two different perspectives here on revolution and that one of them, the one having to do with the Greeks, was I think more of a conservative approach in terms of the way that it would appeal to Americans, whereas the revolutions that Lincoln was embracing involved really the uprooting of a system, a written branch, and creating something completely new and radical.
Well, I guess I want to be specific sort of about current times too, in the sense that when I call George Bush a commie, I mean he is a revolutionary, but from the office of the presidency, right?
He's not a labor leader trying to overthrow the system and create a more utopian society for the little guy, however misguided his efforts.
That's right.
You know, it's funny, I think it was John Derbyshire of National Review who pointed out that even if Obama wanted to, he couldn't really foment a classic proletarian uprising in this country.
He couldn't go in and urge the workers to seize control of the factories because all of our factories are in China anyway.
Yeah.
We don't have any factories to seize with.
Exactly.
But by the same token, you're seeing these huge acts of redistribution of wealth, and they're all taking place now to the benefit of the entrenched super wealthy.
And my argument is, if you take a look at how the capital was dealt with in the former Soviet Union, probably being the best case, if you take a look at what happened toward the end of the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was starting to diversify, what it did was it created all these rival parties, and then basically they deeded to themselves everything of value in the former Soviet Union.
And then they struck the hammer and sickle and ran up the new Russian tricolor, and the same people were basically in charge of things, but now they'd had a new coat of paint applied to them, and now they were considered to be some kind of capitalists, rather than being totalitarian socialists.
They hadn't changed their outlook on life.
They hadn't changed the way that they were doing business.
What they did basically was that they got new business cards and stenciled new titles on their office doors.
And what they did in providing for themselves was they just basically committed grand theft empire.
They just stole everything.
They turned their country, they turned their former empire into an undisguised kleptocracy.
Whereas before it had been a kleptocracy disguised by ideology.
They were trying to rationalize what they did by invoking the sacred writings of Marx and Lenin and their heirs and epigenies.
And here in the United States, we're approaching from exactly the opposite direction.
We've got a system that's becoming very much the same type of kleptocracy, but we've not gone through the phase of overtly totalitarian socialism to get there.
You have our own nomenklatura or ruling elite doing the same thing.
Once again, they're talking about $7.7 trillion or more than half of our gross domestic product being attached by these people… … who have run these financial institutions into the ground, and this is being done through the Office of the Treasury.
That's Alexander Hamilton's office.
He was the inventor of the Department of the Treasury.
And the Office of the Treasury right now is, in fact, the dictatorship running our economy.
And that's something that I pointed out a couple of weeks ago.
I wrote a piece about how our system of government now, whatever adornments the accoutrements it may have to make it look like some kind of a constitutional republic, it's actually triumvirate.
You've got the president in charge of the military and the police.
You've got the Federal Reserve that creates the money, and you've got the Department of the Treasury that's in charge of deciding what the money will be spent on.
And the Congress is just a vestigial organ.
It really doesn't have any significant role now.
The Treasury can decide how much money the Fed will create and whom the money will be given to.
Well, just yesterday, there was a piece in Bloomberg News that talked about the fact that, once again, you had – in the morning, they said it was $7.2 trillion that had been redistributed.
And then they updated it.
They updated it to $7.4 trillion.
By the end of the day, it was $7.7 trillion.
Think of that for a second.
That's a $500 billion rounding error that you're talking about here.
Well, and Congress passed – what was it?
A $700 billion bailout?
$700 billion, yeah.
And basically, by the end of the day yesterday, the rounding error in the reporting was almost as big as the appropriation Congress passed in September, September 28th.
And the interesting thing is that two days after that, September 30th, the Treasury Department changed the tax code to expand the deductions on losses banks – on the losses that banks incur when they buy in-firm financial institutions.
Now, the Treasury Department changed the tax code.
Now, that's legislation.
That's an act of legislation.
That's Congress's duty under the Constitution.
But the Treasury, proprio motu, changed the tax code.
In other words, what they were doing was they were issuing legislation having to do with the disposition of public funds.
That illustrates my point precisely.
I mean, Congress now is basically like the child given the toy steering wheel and allowed to pretend that that child has some influence on the direction that the vehicle is going.
That's a good one.
I like it.
Well, and contra the first sentence of the Constitution, all legislative powers reside in the Congress.
The Constitution is a dead letter lie from the first sentence of the Constitution now.
All legislative power herein granted – well, the power herein granted would not justify any of what we're talking about.
Obviously, that part of the Constitution has been a dead letter for a long time.
But when they talk about all legislative power herein granted, they can't even disguise the fact now that the most important legislative power that Congress exercised – I mean, the one that was really the source of the war for American independence… … which is having to do with the collection and disbursement of public funds.
I mean, that's now being handled entirely by the executive branch, the Treasury Department.
That's what Alexander Hamilton coveted.
There was a biography of Alexander Hamilton that came out about a generation ago called To Covet Honor.
He didn't covet honor.
He coveted power.
And he coveted the precise powers that are being exercised right now by his heir, Mr. Paulson.
And the fact that Mr. Paulson can, on his own supposed authority, not only conjure up money to give away to people, but change tax laws that govern our economy illustrates beyond perventure that we are now living under an economic dictatorship.
Now it will change hands.
We're going to end up with a different dictator in just a few weeks.
But once again, owing to the Philip Drew formula, there's not going to be any sudden discontinuities in policy.
The new dictator will pick up where the old dictator left off.
Yeah, it sure seems like it.
Well, and as long as I got you 15 minutes over time, can I go ahead and keep you longer and ask you about some more stuff here?
Sure.
I mean, if you've got to go, I understand because this is certainly longer than I asked you to.
I can stay for a few more minutes, but I did notice that I'm getting a really insistent call waiting beep every two or three minutes.
Okay.
All right.
Well, I'll just ask you to address one more issue, and there might be kind of a couple of questions that come out of this.
But I'll try to keep it short here.
Sure.
Your site, ProLibertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com, is probably the best single source for keeping people updated on various police atrocities around the country.
And with particularly a focus on local police crimes against people.
And I don't know whether, you know, I guess there's Cop Watch and other places that do this.
Yeah, they do a good job.
But you have done such a good job of talking about how the pretense of the night watchman or whatever has really been thrown out the window.
How regular people, not just poor and minorities on the wrong side of town, but now pretty much everyday people are being treated as, you know, medieval subjects of these people around this country.
And, you know, there's been a lot of talk about the possibility of a draft and national service.
And Obama said something about some new national security force the size of the Pentagon.
I don't know what he was talking about there.
I wonder if you're really worried that we're going to have major institutional changes to go along with sort of the unleashing of the authority of these people on us.
For example, the consolidation of power at more of a federal level over our local and state police, that kind of thing.
Well, we've already seen the local and state police becoming everything but trademark name, the affiliates of Washington, D.C.
I mean, the seminal case in this respect was that of, I believe his name was Aaron Wolf.
I think I mentioned him to you before, the blogger in California who took a bit of video footage during a riot in San Francisco during a protest over some kind of a trade meeting that involved a burning police car from the San Francisco PD.
And he was told by the federal government to turn over that footage as part of a prosecution of a group of people.
And he said, well, I'm protected by the California SHIELD Law.
And the reply from the Bush administration was, well, no, the SHIELD Law doesn't apply because the police car in question belonged to a police department that was receiving Homeland Security funds, so it was federal property.
Now that they've made that claim, that claim's been upheld, basically there's no reason to think that any police agency in this country that's received so much as a farthing of Homeland Security or Pentagon property or direct support.
Which is all of them, right?
All of them, yeah.
They're all basically affiliates of the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security.
In principle, it's just a question of to what extent the central government wants to use that control to carry out its priorities.
What I'm actually worried about right now as we take a look at this rapidly unfolding economic collapse here is the way that the police particularly are being unleashed as undisguised tax gatherers.
And so there's no longer any pretense here when you see the police being sent out to patrol sweet spots, hot spots, fishing holes for traffic violations or speeding violations or seat belt violations as a way of bringing in revenue.
Just this morning here in Idaho, I live in a little town called Payette, Idaho, which is on the western border hard up against the border of Oregon.
I was listening to the radio, and there's a proposal before the legislature.
There's going to be one put before the legislature next January calling for a five-fold increase in the amount of money that would be collected for a seat belt infraction.
And I shook my head and said, well, that's not because they're worried about people not wearing their seat belts.
That's just a way of making up a budget shortfall.
And over in Detroit, this is something I mentioned recently in an essay on my blog.
In Detroit, you've got a literal depression that's unfolding where people don't have the financial wherewithal to take care of themselves or maintain their payments on their mortgages.
You've got grass growing on a lot of the residential streets in Detroit.
You've got homes going for a dollar.
And amid this incredible economic downturn with all the misery and hardship that ensues, the civic officials have built these huge jails and courthouses and civic buildings that have to be paid for somehow.
And so what they've been doing, and this is something the Detroit News documented in a two-part series over the weekend, magnificently documented it, they're sending out the police with quotas to collect traffic fines and fines for moving violations.
Now, this may seem like an annoyance, but if you remember, go back and take a look at the history of the American Revolution where it talks about swarms of officials sent out to eat out our substance.
This is pretty much the same idea.
It's just that these now are people who are supposedly deployed in our communities to protect us.
What I can see happening as well, and this is something that really has me concerned.
If you take a look at the role that the sheriff's departments play in foreclosures and seizures for eminent domain, there are some ugly things that are going to be happening in that realm too.
We talk about, in my blog, there's a lot of discussion about the way that ordinances having to do with planning and zoning and various property regulations, all of which are spurious from a constitutional point of view and entirely spurious from a natural rights point of view, that are used basically to regulate the way people can use their own property.
A lot of this is being done now supposedly to keep property values up amid the downturn, as if that's going to happen.
You simply can't keep property values up when property values are undergoing an overdue and badly needed correction or depression.
But that's not going to stop these people from going out and using what they can to nibble these people to death through various citations, exactions, taxes, and so forth.
Hey, let me ask you something.
Was there a time in American history, say before I was born, you're a few years older than me, I was born in the mid-70s.
So was there a time, maybe even when I was a little kid and just didn't know enough about it or whatever, where say, for example, a local sheriff's department or a local city police agency just wouldn't dare officially make their policy go out and tax the hell out of everybody and call it speeding tickets?
I mean, was there ever a time that this kind of thing would be beyond the pale, that they wouldn't run their police departments like this?
Or this is the way it's always been, it's just now they have M-16s and things and tanks like they didn't have before.
I think it's closer to the latter than the former, Scott.
I do know that if you take a look at the history of what happened after, it's interesting, it happens during and after wars.
This is the sort of thing that becomes very salient.
After World War I, particularly in a number of Midwestern and sometimes Southern jurisdictions, there were a lot of law enforcement agencies, local law enforcement agencies that behaved themselves this way.
And it wasn't until, I think, 1928 or 1929 or so, through the influence of the American Bar Association, of all the unlikely people, that there were actual professional standards of conduct that were imposed on a lot of these police agencies because they were robbing people blind.
And this, of course, is something that has been a localized problem throughout history.
There have always been speed traps.
There have always been the boss hog type local Banana Republic Sheriff's Departments that have been run as part of an engine of corruption in collaboration with really corrupt and opportunistic municipal officials.
There's an actual case.
I'm trying to remember where the town was located.
There was a movie made about it called An American Story of people who came back from World War II.
A group of veterans came back to their town after World War II and they found out that their city was being run that way.
And there was a literal citywide war that was waged between these war veterans and the local Sheriff's Department in order to clean up this town because the Sheriff's Department and the posse and the local police and so forth were simply shaking people down and making it impossible for them to live.
So you've had local problems of that sort.
What's happened, of course, though, is that now that they're militarized and that the locus of accountability has been shifted entirely to Washington and out of the local communities, you've got a really nasty dynamic set in play here where either they could be unleashed on the communities as forces of maintaining order, which is, I think, what the Obama regime would like to do when it comes to power.
It would be to use these, basically, the same way that the Bush administration really had designs to do, as a way of regimenting society and moving it in a radically different direction.
That's one possibility.
The other possibility is that the whole economy will collapse.
These people will be unleashed on the local communities like the conditory the mercenary soldiers were after the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century in Europe.
Neither one of these is a very appetizing prospect.
All right.
Well, we can all look forward to that.
And, of course, we'll also have our war veterans coming back and getting jobs as local sheriff's deputies.
That'll be really fun being treated like that.
They've been practicing on the people of Mosul and Fallujah, and then they can come and use their tactics on us.
In fact, we had a case here in Austin, and the guy openly admitted, and I don't think he was really just making excuses, I think he was telling the truth.
He said, you know, what happened was he started firing his weapon in this parking lot, chasing a guy way out of bounds for an Austin Police Department employee.
And he said, you know what?
I was in Iraq, and in Iraq you're chasing a bad guy like that?
You shoot at him.
And I just kind of blanked out.
He seemed like probably a pretty decent guy or whatever, but he was stuck.
He had been trained, I think is what they call it, training.
And the Austin Police Department is the same law enforcement office, let us not forget, that fired Ramon Perez because he refused to use his taser on an elderly citizen who was taken into custody using soft hand methods.
You probably remember that case.
Which one now?
Ramon Perez.
He was a successful man.
He was in his late 30s, early 40s when he became a police officer.
He's an ordained minister.
He's a homeschooling father of five.
Wonderful guy.
And he was the outstanding cadet in his academy class.
And he came into the force with leadership credentials and maturity.
You know, he's a 40, 41-year-old guy.
Within six months he got in trouble because he was part of a group of officers who responded to a domestic violence call.
And there was an elderly couple having a fight, and the 65, 66-year-old man was going to be arrested, and he decided he didn't want to arrest him.
He started to resist.
And one of the supervisors told Officer Perez to use the taser on the guy.
And Officer Perez says, no, I don't think that's necessary.
I think we can probably handle this in a way that doesn't involve escalation.
And so he de-escalated the situation, which is what police officers used to be trained to do, and he took him into custody basically by talking him down.
And Officer Perez got a note slipped in his file saying that he defied an order from a superior officer.
As it happens, that order was in violation of the Austin Police Department's usage guidelines for the taser.
And it was from Ramon Perez's point of view completely unconstitutional to use this electroshock torture implement against somebody who was not putting up violent resistance.
But he ended up being cashiered from the force in six or seven months.
And the incident that led to him being removed from the force was his refusal to use a taser illegally to subdue an unarmed senior citizen.
Man, I need to start reading the paper.
He's got a lawsuit pending against Austin.
It'll be interesting to see how that turns out.
But yeah, he's a good guy.
And people like him, once again, would have been more representative of the police departments when I was a young man than the police departments would be constituted today.
But they're the people, the first to get purged today, which tells you everything you need to know about our state of affairs.
Well, OK, now let me ask you one more thing.
And this is my most paranoid self asking this.
And there has been a lot of talk, and there's nobody can deny the danger in the law of it's been in place.
And I'm referring to the rewriting of Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act by the Defense Authorization Act of 2006.
Now, Carl Levin and them in the Senate repealed that section.
And yet Bush wrote a signing statement that said, I don't care what you say.
And so apparently it's still the law of the land that the conditions for, you know, the president without the authority, without any more authority from Congress than this law itself.
And his signing statement can declare martial law has been reduced to other.
That's not paranoid at all.
I mean, take it in the most literal sense.
The word paranoia means that you simply have a heightened awareness of what's going on.
I mean, a paranoid is somebody who simply notices things.
You know, that's different from clinical paranoia where you cannot help noticing things when you start deluding yourself about what it is you're seeing.
But you're simply being more observant than most when you point these things out.
The fact that the Posse Comitatus Act was rewritten the way it was is very suggestive of bad intentions on the part of the people who did this.
And once again, I find myself reflecting on the fact that this whole apparatus is going to be inherited by somebody, Mr. Obama, who has these ambitions about reconstructing society, reconstructing American society, reducing our demand, reducing our standard of living, which is going to be reduced already by the Depression.
That we're going to experience.
But the fact is that this still is on the books.
It's on the books for a reason.
It's on there because somebody intends to use it.
And the only way it could be used is against those of us who don't want to be pushed around by the government that is ruling us.
And that sets up, once again, a pretty elemental conflict between those who wield power and those against whom it is wielded.
And I come back to the fact that that was not supposed to be the American idea of governance.
The American idea of governance is we lend power to certain people for the sole purpose of protecting our rights and our property.
And we are so far beyond that basic, rudimentary concept of American values and law that I don't think we could ever recover, at least not in the configuration that we're in right now.
Right.
I mean, that's back to the dialectic, basically, is that you can take left-wing attitudes or liberal attitudes, conservative right-wing attitudes, and use them toward the same end, which is simply building up state power.
None of them of the rank and file ever really get what they want, but they end up endorsing, trading off every four or eight years if necessary, endorsing what the state is doing.
And it is really, in a sense, even though it is George Bush of the bluest blood, it is revolutionary in terms of overthrowing our Constitution and overthrowing the very definitions of separations of powers and the forms of our government that we all learn as kids.
Exactly right.
All right, everybody, that's William Norman Gregg.
The book is Liberty in Eclipse.
Indispensable.
Run out and get it right now.
It's online.
You can buy it in ten different places.
The blog is Pro Libertate.
That's freedominourtime.blogspot.com, and he's got one on lewrockwell.com today as well.
Thanks very much for your time today, Will.
Thank you.
Take care.
All right, folks, that's been an extra-super-duper extended edition of Antiwar Radio.
We're here 11 to 1, usually, Texas time, Monday through Friday.
We'll see you all tomorrow.
