07/19/12 – Matthew Rothschild – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
ScottHortonShow.com for the archives.
2,500 of them going back to interviews, that is.
Going back to 2003, something like that.
The next one, 2,501 or so, I don't know, something like that, is Matthew Rothschild, the editor of the Progressive magazine.
Progressive.org, of course, is the website.
President could seize radio, internet, under new executive order.
Reads the title, yikes.
They're setting up a system for doing away with our former rule of law that we think we knew.
Yeah, this has been happening for years now.
It happened under George W. Bush.
I mean, there was National Security Directive 51, where he said in times of a national emergency, whether it's a natural disaster or an economic crisis or some kind of attack, that he, the President of the United States, could basically run the whole show and tell Congress and the Supreme Court and the states and the counties and the cities and the tribes what to do.
That's kind of amazing stuff.
And then here, Obama's put through a couple of executive orders in the last few months.
One was called in March, the National Defense Resources Preparedness Order, where he said he can tell the civilian economy what to do, basically, if he says there's a national emergency.
And now we have this one that just came out on July 6th called the Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions, which gives the President of the United States more power or expands on the power that's already there on the books to essentially grab radio stations and perhaps even the internet if he decides and declares that there's a national emergency.
So my question is really, you know, when is Congress going to wake up to this?
When are the American people going to wake up to this, that there are plans, blueprints on the shelf, for essentially getting rid of our form of government?
I would think that the people have a right to know what's really in store for us before that store opens.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
Well, and I think we've talked before about that interview, must have been in 2005 or so, 2004 or 2005, with Tommy Franks in Cigar Aficionado magazine, where he said, you know, if we had another attack like September 11th, we would have to move to a military form of government.
That is just apparent.
And he really seemed to be speaking for the establishment consensus there, that this is what we all know, which is that, you know, the pretense that we still have a constitution, or, you know, the one from 1789 here in America, would have to end at that point.
And, you know, next red alert means that's the end of that.
Is that pretty much your interpretation of what's really going on here?
I'm quite convinced, I'm sorry to interrupt, Scott, I'm quite convinced that Bush and Cheney had plans prepared for declaring martial law.
That's what General Tommy Franks was talking about, martial law.
And there was another deputy to Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council, William Downing, who said, you know, if there's another attack this time with weapons of mass destruction, biological or chemical, we'd have to declare a martial law.
There were discussions going on in Washington about under what conditions there was going to be a martial law declared in the United States.
And, you know, where were the hearings on this?
Did I miss them?
Did C-SPAN not televise them?
I mean, what's going on here?
They were talking about martial law in the United States, which should make anyone who cares about democracy shudder, and yet it just kind of went on and no one took notice.
And so I've been focusing on this question and this problem for many years now and wondering, you know, there may come a time when a president, I don't think Obama's going to do it, I know a lot of the people on the right wing hate Obama and think he's the devil incarnate and he's the anti-Christ and all that.
I think that's a bunch of baloney.
But, you know, it's within the realm of the possible that we'll have a president elected in the next 12, 16, 20 years who doesn't appreciate democracy at all and is going to just say, guess what, fellas, there's an emergency now and I'm going to take control of the economy, I'm going to take control of the radio waves, I'm going to take control of the Internet, and, you know, I've got the military behind me.
What are you going to do to stop it?
And then what would happen?
You know, can't we have that conversation before that happens?
Right.
Well, you know, this is the whole thing in Robert Higgs' great book Crisis and Leviathan.
It's the ratchet effect where, you know, after 240 or whatever years of emergencies here, starting with the Whiskey Rebellion, boy, do we have a powerful government.
And even when the so-called emergency, well, depending on how real it is, is sort of irrelevant, whenever it ends, whether it's a major war or a dust bowl or whatever it is, the power is never repealed back to where it was before.
It never, you know, we never have a real return to normalcy again.
And so now we're at the point where, you know, what other power over us can they claim after they claim the power to just have the army take us?
You know, the right to our wives on our wedding night?
You know what I mean?
They've crossed every single line that there is to cross.
And that's the thing.
And that's the thing.
And if it came to that point, I'm sure the person who wanted to seize dictatorial powers would say, you know, I'm not tearing up the Constitution right here on camera.
What I'm doing is saying I have this authority because of such and such law.
For instance, Obama, in this latest executive order, cited the Communications Act of 1934.
And so, you know, they'll pull out all these legal precedents.
They'd call out the authorization for use of military force against Al Qaeda.
They'd call out the National Defense Authorization Act.
You know, they would cite all these legal precedents for doing something grotesquely illegal, which was to destroy our democracy.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, part of the ratchet effect, too, is people just getting used to it.
You know, it used to be the story of Rex 84 and Operation Garden Plot and the Oliver North plan to round up anti-war protesters if they got away with invading Nicaragua and that kind of thing.
That was scandalous, but people believed, the few people who knew about it believed that if everyone knew about it, it would have mattered, right?
But now everybody knows and it doesn't matter.
We'll be right back with Matthew Rothschild from The Progressive, progressive.org, right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthortonshow.com.
It's the website.
And later on the show, we're going to be talking with Nathan Wessler from the ACLU about their lawsuit.
They and the CCR are suing Barack Obama over the assassination of American citizens.
We'll see whether secrecy will be a good enough excuse to keep that out of the courts.
My money is on yes, it will be.
Anyway, we're talking with Matthew Rothschild about some other examples of this.
Really, it's a revolution within the forum.
That's what Garrett Gourette would have called it, where they didn't really just outright throw out the Constitution, or at least not yet, but they just act as though that Fifth Amendment is not there.
They act as though that Article I, Section 9 is not there, and they just do whatever they want.
And they're really, as you say, well, I don't know.
The way you say it, I'm interested.
Do you really think that they are deliberately setting up all of the precedents so that we will one day see what they want is for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, and they go ahead and really do start rounding people up and acting like Nazis just because they can at that point?
Or what is going on here?
Well, I think part of it is just the bureaucratic desire by the executive branch just to grab more and more power as you go.
The latest executive order was a revision of a Bush administration executive order.
But I do think, for instance, under Bush, Cheney, that they had no respect whatsoever for democracy and that they did have plans underway for imposing martial law.
Actually, someone as high up in the media as Ted Koppel mentioned at some graduation speech he gave that there were plans for martial law and that maybe we should have a discussion of it.
But even that didn't get much splash in the media.
So I think part of it is just kind of institutional aggrandizement now by Obama.
Part of it is he doesn't want to be accused of not having been prepared or prepared the executive branch if, God forbid, we're attacked again.
So he just is grabbing all this power, I mean the power to assassinate U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, the power to throw U.S. citizens behind bars and not let them see a judge.
I mean, this is just ripping up habeas corpus, which is 900 years old.
And Bush was doing it too.
But Obama, far from tearing down the edifice of repression that Bush and Cheney had erected, he's adding new floors to the building.
And so we need to wake up to the fact that our civil liberties here are hanging by a thread and demand that they get restored.
But I'm not hearing that demand loud and clear from many people except the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights and a few folks in the media like you and me.
Well, you know, occasionally, even in the mass media, you'll have some kind of coverage about the change.
Certainly it's not, it doesn't really come, I'm thinking of the Top Secret America series in the Washington Post.
It doesn't really come with a very severe objection or anything.
It's just saying, look, everybody, we've decided that it's time to update you a little bit on just how much everything changed since September 11th.
And there's this entire new national security state on the domestic level that has been erected that is almost all blanketed in secrecy.
It costs uncounted hundreds of billions of dollars.
There's no accountability, and there's no, as you keep referring to the media coverage, there's no real explanation, not on TV anyway, where average people have a chance to really even understand what's happened there.
But when they said everything changed, they really meant it.
A lot has changed.
And another thing that's changed that hardly anyone's paying attention to is this alliance between the law enforcement agencies of this government at every level and private sector businesses.
You've got, for instance, at the Republican National Convention coming down in Tampa, you've got waste management truck drivers acting as spies for the police.
They're supposed to be going out and reporting anything suspicious they see.
And then you have a group called InfraGard that has got more than 50,000 business members who meet regularly with their local FBI officers in their state or in their city, and they share information.
I mean, this is going on, and it's totally under the radar.
Yeah, you know what it is, too, is it comes out in drips and drabs, and it's outrage fatigue in a way.
We were just talking the other day with a guest about the, I forgot the numbers, but it was an insanely high number of times that regular local police departments and state police departments across the country get GPS data and telephone record data from the cell phone companies just for the asking.
They don't need any kind of warrant.
They just waltz right in.
Sometimes they have their own key to the website.
They can just go and get whatever they want.
And so far there's been a little bit of success of judges stopping them, but not much.
And in a vacuum, this would be the biggest outrage in the whole wide world.
This would be absolutely, this should be earth-shattering.
Society comes to a screeching halt so that we can address this thing, and yet it's just one of a thousand outrages.
And so who can organize them all?
Who can prioritize which ones are the worst and in which order?
Well, it's that.
It's that kind of fatigue.
It may be that people don't value their privacy and their first freedoms enough, and it may be that the way the media functions right now, first of all, with the entertainment and distraction that they feast upon, and also just this one story after another on the conveyor belt that is the 24-7 news cycle, that people, you know, they don't stay on a story unless it's the Kardashians, you know, or unless it's the Prince of Wales or something.
And so the story just is one of a hundred stories that week, and then the next week we're on to something else.
And this is really just to get lost in the forest.
Yeah.
Well, and especially when, like you're saying, we're talking about habeas corpus and posse comitatus and all these fancy words that mean our very core right to stay out of a dungeon unless they got a real good case for what felony we committed, you know?
Right, and the right not to have tanks just rolling down Main Street.
I mean, is that what we really want to have?
You know, Chile had a democracy for a hundred years, and it was dissolved by Pinochet really fast.
And it crosses my mind just how quickly things can go south, and I think it should cross a lot of people's minds.
Yeah.
Well, now, you write about, you know, your article here at the Progressive Matthew ends with a call to action by the Congress that, you know, hey, it's time for some real hearings.
I guess you mentioned that in the first segment, too.
You know, a full-scale investigation so that it's not just another news story.
We do get all of this, the airing it deserves.
Do you see any movement toward that at all?
Are there any heroes in the Congress who would even bother at this point?
The one senator who would have bothered was Russ Feingold, and he got defeated two years ago.
These were big issues for him, Patrick Leahy possibly, but I doubt it, Bernie Sanders maybe.
And I'm not just talking about secret hearings.
I mean, I hate when our senators go into confidential hearings.
These should be public hearings.
There shouldn't be secret hearings.
There should be public hearings.
And we need to demand them right now.
Our senators should be holding hearings.
The Democrats should hold hearings.
And, you know, if the Republicans take power, you know, the Democrats will start be— I imagine may start screaming about all these presidential powers that have been accumulated, but, you know, because there's a Democrat in the White House, they keep their mouth shut.
I mean, that's not upholding their duties to be officers of the Constitution.
Yeah, well put.
Yeah, I guess, you know, Ron Paul's just on all the wrong committees for this.
Well, Ron Paul— And he's on his way out anyway.
Yeah, you know, Ron Paul has been great on a lot of these issues.
Yeah, I mean, he had this bill back in 2007 called the Freedom Restoration Act that basically just repealed the 21st century, everything that Bush had done, the spying and the torture and the jail without trials and, you know, as much of it as he possibly could was in there.
And he's been pretty clear that that's what his presidency would have looked like, too.
It's too bad the American people just didn't take him up on the chance.
I mean, you wouldn't have to agree with him on everything to agree with him that the Bill of Rights is worth preserving, you know.
And it was nice hearing that view expressed in the Republican debates.
You know, there he was.
He was talking about our civil liberties.
No one else was talking about them.
So I applaud him for that.
Yeah.
Wow.
And he certainly, just by example, made a mockery of the rest of them, you know.
It's really amazing, isn't it, the presidential election.
I have to try to force myself to be interested.
It's like Obama running against himself or Mitt Romney in both parties.
I can't see the difference whatsoever.
It's like that Futurama episode where it's the two clones, Robert Johnson and John Robertson, running against each other.
Well, in the media coverage and the discussions by, you know, a lot of the pundits, it's all, you know, are you rooting for the Chicago Cubs or are you rooting for the Chicago White Sox?
You know, it's just people going to their camps and they're not analyzing the extent to which there's a lot of agreement between, you know, Bush and Obama and then Obama and Romney.
And let's look at continuity over time.
I mean, you know, we still have this, you know, runaway crony capitalism here.
We still are an empire.
We still have troops in more than 100 countries, and we still have this tremendous power in the hands of the president.
Well, at least we have some principal rioters who stay at it.
Thank goodness for that.
It's Matthew Rothschild, progressive.org, his website for the Progressive magazine.
Subscribe to it.
Why not?
Thanks very much for your time, Matthew, as always.
My pleasure.
Let's do it again.