Davidson Unplugged. November 22, An Empire Run by Idiots

Transcription

1 Davidson Unplugged November 22, 2015 An Empire Run by Idiots Hey, everyone. This is Charles Delvalle. And I'd like to welcome you to the latest Davidson Unplugged. As always, I have James Dale Davidson on the line. How are you? Well, I'm just sitting here contemplating the emphatic realization that Donald Trump was right when he said our leaders were stupid. And he may have just been right in implying that the voters were stupid, too [laughter]. It's a strange charm offensive. But the Donald, I guess, doesn't care who he offends. Seems to hit the nail on the head. I've been thinking about this ridiculous and really horrifying mass murder in Paris. Which seems to have been timed to underscore the announcement from President Obama earlier that day that ISIS was entirely contained. Didn't have to worry about it anymore. I guess that was not one of the better-timed statements to come out of the White House. So, anyway. It's an interesting situation, because I think, as David Stockman has pointed out, we're in an environment where we're living with what they used to call blowback. Blowback, in a simple sense, was where somebody's brains got blown out, and you got splattered by them. In this case, we seem to have blown out our own brains some long while ago, and we're now getting the splatter. The biggest issue that, I think, that's interesting about Page 1 of 10

2 ISIS is when we say we're trying to defeat ISIS, we were the ones who started ISIS in the first place. We created ISIS. I think if you wanted to treat yourself to a lot of depressing reading, you could Google a phrase like Saddam's generals run ISIS. And you will find a treasure trove of articles, reports and dispatches in major publications. But always probably in the back page somewhere. Describing the fact that up to 100 of the top military leaders of Saddam's army are now employed full time running ISIS: This also helps explain a number of other little peculiarities. If you're somebody like I am who reads the news, follows it, you can't help but be a bit puzzled by some of the conflicting reports. For example, there's this guy who's supposed to be the head of ISIS. His name is Abu Bakr al-baghdadi. Which does underscore the fact it's an Iraqi operation. Because al-baghdadi you don't have to be much of a linguist to realize that connects the guy to Baghdad. But what I found interesting about al-baghdadi is that press reports indicated in 2007 that he was dead. In 2008, it was reported he'd been arrested. In 2009, he was dead again [laughs]. And in 2010, he'd been arrested yet again. So he has a future in theology if he can come back from the dead over and over again [laughter]. Wow, that's crazy. One of the reports that was quite interesting, I found, that explained his ability to come and go like the Holy Ghost, is that he didn't even exist [laughter]. There was a guy who was named al-baghdadi, who read various reports, statements on YouTube. And Page 2 of 10

3 proclaiming the caliphate and so on. But this guy was an actor who was hired by Saddam's generals to be the al- Baghdadi of the moment while they worked behind the scenes punishing us for our abject stupidity in invading Iraq. On the grounds that there were terrorists at work there. There was plenty of potential for terror, to be sure. But the terrorists weren't there at that time. Saddam had that pretty tight. Yeah, he was a total despot and a horrible person. I agree about that. But it was like punching a hornet's nest. Like we stupidly used to do. And as a result, we did the following. We destroyed the Iraqi government. There were 400,000 men in the Iraqi army. Plus a lot of officers, generals and senior officials. Some of whom are thought to be fairly well-trained and clever and also ruthless, as they had been involved in a number of wars, including the war against Iran, and the invasion of Kuwait and the many attempts to suppress and destroy the Kurds. So these guys had a battle-tested, trained military. Yeah, they were the real deal. So now their expertise is part of the explanation for the continued success of the Islamic State. Because they also were trained by us through our stupid policy of instituting these blockades, or politically inspired limitations on trade to prohibit Iraq from exploiting its oil. So if you want to know why part of the reason Islamic State can continue to raise a lot of cash by exporting oil, it's because these guys were all trained by the U.S. inadvertently when we put in our policy to prohibit them from selling. They got a lot of experience evading the U.S. sanctions. Page 3 of 10

4 That was a big mistake. In any event, we told the generals and other Iraqi officers of the Iraqi army, "Well, you're not going to get your pension. You're being fired. You're no longer going to be paid. You can't be employed in Iraq, but you can keep your weapons." Wow. World-class stupidest move ever. Extreme stupidity. I mean, Bush and Cheney and these guys have a lot to answer for that moronic invasion that cost the lives of good people, and totally destroyed Iraq. And it's destroying Syria now. And you have to ask a question: Were they ever really interested in creating any kind of stability there? Or were they out from the beginning to create instability? You have to ask well, why would they do it? Because it's so obvious that they've created a nightmare. And then we went further. We sent all this money to the so-called Free Syrian Army, which was entirely a fictitious operation. Who were the Free Syrian Army? Nobody knows. They were all these Iraqi generals and people who were getting free weapons from the United States and also a lot of Toyota trucks they use to roam around in, as you can see in their videos. We provided all that. Provided millions and millions of dollars and weapons to the Islamic State. What were we thinking? The only thing I can think of that makes any sense out of it at all is if you go back to this time more or less in the year The Berlin Wall came down. Must have been a deep shock to what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. Because it inhibited a chance for real peace in the world for the first time since before the First World War. And this must have been terrible if you were a person whose business was based upon getting taxpayers to pay lots of money for weapons of mass destruction. Page 4 of 10

5 So they were suddenly faced with the possibility there wouldn't be more weapons. They had to find a new enemy to replace the Soviet Union. And maybe the terrorist attacks provided that, which were provided by al-qaeda, which was another organization we helped start. Carter's national security advisor helped launch al- Qaeda as an arm to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, even before the Soviets invaded. Actually, the al-qaeda launch preceded the Soviet invasion by a few months. Because they thought if they could create a lot of attacks against the Soviet-backed government there, that this would cause the Soviets to invade. So it was sort of a rope-a-dope deal [laughs]. They did. And then we spent all this money finding these lunatics and getting them all agitated. And guess what? They were lunatics and continued to kill people all over the globe. This is where the second tranche of Trump's indictment about us being stupid comes into play. Speaking of World War One, if you go back to the time of World War One, the public at least were smart enough to understand there were people in whose interests wars were fought, and not necessarily were they the interests of the average person. There was a very big selling book in the wake of World War One called The Merchants of Death, which explained how the armament industry had made a huge killing out of the war. And there were large groups of people who thought it shouldn't go that way again. Now, ever since World War Two we've been a little softened up to the idea that we've spent a vast amount of money, and it's even more vast than we think. Because if we look at the budget for the Page 5 of 10

6 United States military, you'd say we're spending $600 billion to $700 billion a year. The reality is, it's about twice that much. Because a lot of the military spending is disguised in other line items. So we're spending a vast amount of money. And I think we can readily say that a lot of this money is being misspent, without really becoming unpatriotic, or becoming a complete naysayer. But really we're doing something that makes no sense at all. No, I mean even if we just look at some of these projects, some of the fighter jets, when you look at the billions and billions and billions that have been spent on some of these things, and there's still no success or very little success, it almost looks like they're just throwing their money in a hole. Well, we're spending more money than every other country combined on the military. I don't know how we spend it so inefficiently. But we're creating enemies every place we go, which is itself an achievement. But I also feel so sorry for the innocent people who were killed in all of this, who were the victims. Oh, yeah, a lot of people got caught up in all of this. I mean, if you look at just the civilians that have been killed in the Middle East since all this meddling, it totally outnumbers what a lot of people imagine. We usually only hear about our troops' deaths. We don't hear about anyone else that was in NATO who may have died in combat. We don't hear about the other armies so much. And we certainly rarely hear about civilians. Oh, we heard about people in Paris who were going about their business. And that's ghastly. Page 6 of 10

7 Oh, yeah. It's awful. Not for nothing. These things are awful acts. There's nothing good about them, really. Terrorists really take these things and do the ugliest things possible and they usually do it in a way that's going to strike at our very psyche. This happened in cafes in Paris, at a stadium. It happened in places where people weren't even thinking about this. They were having a great time. Maybe they were drinking wine. Who knows what they were doing seconds before all this stuff unraveled? When people start thinking about that, they go, Oh, man, well, how many things do I do every day where this could possibly happen? And then it stirs a reaction. Then that reaction tends to lead to a lot more money being spent [laughs]. And if we just look at the amount of money I remember one time you had a tally for how much money it cost us to kill each person in al- Qaeda, essentially, or each terrorist, and how much we had to invest just to kill one. And it was an astounding sum. Totally not worth it. Millions. Hundreds of millions. It was. I remember. But look at this. The other thing I ask is whether we really can afford it. And this goes back to the other question of how stupid our leaders are. What are they thinking? And I ask this, in particular, in reference to the October jobs report, which was conjured up to show that we had the biggest growth of employment opportunities in the month of October for the entire year. Was supposed to be a really big, strong report. This was to encourage everybody to think, OK, we can go ahead and increase interest rates. And interest rates probably should be increased, but not because the employment report is strong. This whole thing is a total fandango of lies. And it makes me wonder why the news media are so asleep at the switch when it comes to Page 7 of 10

8 examining these lies. The thing that comes right out [laughs] when you look at it is the whole thing is a function of faulty seasonal adjustments. We've talked in the past about the fact that when the employment numbers are reported, they are subjected to what is known as concurrent seasonal adjustments. Which is really a way of saying jobs reported back in June, July, August, September, could be re-reported in the month of October, because the numbers are completely incommensurate. You can't add up the headline number of jobs and employees created, allegedly, each month and come to a total. Because the same job is being repeated over again in some cases. And at least 200,000 of the jobs and there were 271,000, supposedly were fictions that were created from the birth/death calculation, which they use to account for the jobs for new companies coming into existence that were supposed to be too new to be properly brought into the system of reporting. But there have been very effective studies that show, in fact, more jobs are being lost every month than are being created, and more companies are going out of business than are being created. So there is no birth/death positive attribution of 200,000 jobs. At least there's no reason to think that's the case. If it's true, this last month, it would be a miracle. And the other thing that I pointed out as we were talking before this recording is if you look at the birth/death or rather the jobs created, supposedly, in October, and don't subject them to seasonal adjustment, they're not seasonally-adjusted numbers, we re at a 17- month low. So the numbers that actually count are at a low. Page 8 of 10

9 The real numbers didn't suggest any strength at all. And then you have to ask. They knew what they were doing. They're making these numbers up. This is a tissue of lies. So why do they make up lies to say that the economy is strong when it really isn't? When this is going to have the same kind of effect as taking Saddam's generals and taking away their pensions and telling them they can't be employed in Iraq, but letting them keep their weapons? I mean, that is a sure recipe for creating chaos. Just as pretending the economy is stronger than it is is a sure recipe for driving up the dollar, which then has resulted sure enough in the days since that report was announced in the commodity prices hitting a low for the whole century so far. Remember, early in this century there was an important event which took place, which was when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. Which led to a huge surge in Chinese purchases of commodities as they were processing the commodities for the sale of manufactured goods, and also for their huge infrastructure initiatives. We remember what some of those were. How absolutely overblown they were. Still. The commodity gains that occurred after China reached the World Trade Center have been entirely reversed. As the dollar has gone up, these commodities have plunged. We're in a deep deflationary vortex. Probably going to see the biggest collapse in history coming along. And this is something to which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Obama, who presumably presided over the initiative to tell them to make these lies, has to bear some responsibility. They made the dollar stronger. They increased the deflationary impulse on the world. And we're going to get a combination of terrorism and economic collapse Page 9 of 10

10 because of the incompetent and peculiar policies of our government. So that's my take for the day [laughter]. Well, as always, it was a very interesting take. Very thoughtful things to ponder over. And I hope that everyone does. And of course, if anyone has any questions, or would like to hear us comment on anything in particular, you can always send us an . We'll be back soon [laughs]. Yes [laughs]. We will be back soon. Thank you so much. Everyone have a great night. Bye now. [End of Audio] Page 10 of 10