 Ladies and gentlemen, if anybody in the room is not currently reading David Stockman, you should be Of course you as some of you probably remember he was director of OMB under Reagan He was a congressman prior to that but far more importantly from my perspective anyway Is that he wrote what I think is one of the most important financial books ever written and certainly that the most important Financial book of the 21st century called the great deformation which not only explains the crash of 2008 But also explains so much about central banking and how it finances all kinds of evil in the decades prior He has a new book out called trumped which somebody needs to get to trump and have him read it ASAP because I'm afraid without that We are going to be lost in some kind of a cataclysm of of spending but David Stockman that runs a website called contra corner He is an absolute tireless Writer against crony capitalism, and I think he's one of the leading lights in our movement today. Thanks so much David Stockman Well, thank you very much for that warm welcome. It's the first time anybody's applauded Since way back in 1985 when they ran me out of Washington on a rail In the Reagan administration, but I really want to give my sincere appreciation to Jeff for saying a good thing about my book the great deformation because when it came out in 2013 it was denounced by every point on the political compass the republicans and the democrats and the liberals and the Conservatives and wall street hated it in the military industrial complex found it offensive And it got denounced wildly loudly by the neocons in the congress and the social cons In the tax cons and the just cons which is about everybody else left there But I expected it to some degree because I said, you know, the book is saying we're heading to a terrible dystopia Where the fed is destroying capitalism where imperial washington is wrecking the world with all its interventions Where we're going bankrupt because of this government that can't stop spending and borrowing. So I expected some Blowback, let's call it But you know, I thought at one point One of the critics went way over the top and that was your friend professor paul krugman Who the day the book came out wrote a blog called the rantings of a cranky old man And that was what he had to say about my book But you know that was going so far that it even aroused my 88 year old mother Who upon reading his blog shot me an email saying Doesn't he know you were a cranky young man, too And the point is that I think there are a lot of cranky people in america Who responded to what I had to say because Within one day after that cranky old man blog my book and i'm not bragging here Went to number four on the amazon bestseller list And their only thing ahead of it was two diet books And something a novel a horror novel called the walking dead So I thought well, maybe there is an audience out there But the true Point of the matter is that It did end up number three on the new york times bestseller list and again I'm not bragging because after three years They're still debating at the new york time whether times whether that was number three On the fiction or the nonfiction category But in any event, I'm very happy to be here to be part of this conference on war and peace I think we're on the war part today At least as a result of the events of the last Couple of days But I do want to give just a quick update jeff on your point about the general getting all hot and bothered about the tomahawks Here's the news flash on the tomahawks. They fired 59 36 of them were duds that landed in the desert somewhere 23 hit the airfields None of them hit the runway. They're launching sorties today from the runway That we didn't hit not a single operable plane was taken out. What they did hit was three butler buildings Otherwise known as hangers in a graveyard for inoperable planes that have been sitting there for the last Who knows how long so the point is this was kind of a random crazy thing? Where did it come from two days? No investigation possible plenty of circumstantial Reasons to think that this was a false flag very much like what happened back in august 213 Everybody's forgot about that the goda event so-called But when you go back and look at what some of the objective Evidence is investigations today. It's pretty clear that it wasn't launched by the regime It was launched by local jihadist radicals who are trying to bait obama in to doing exactly what trump did Two days ago when he had foolishly put out that red line I also want to before we get into the main topic Want to welcome everyone. I was delighted to hear that there are people here from mexico and canada And uh, hopefully hopefully you'll come back next year even if you have to leap the wall When the thing actually gets built Jeff had a very good observation About the think tanks which just have proliferated everywhere in washington and i'm going to talk about that They all say the same thing I turned on cable news Thursday night and you couldn't find anything from msnbc to cnn to fox that said anything difference or all these generals all these consultants All these think tank experts all these x You know national security consul types all saying the same thing they were in war heat And so it reminds me today jeff that really you don't have a whole bunch of think tanks around washington You have a whole bunch of group think Tanks they all think the same thing because they're all paid by the same pay master Which I call the warfare state in a moment We'll get into some of the detail, but it's a trillion dollar monster that basically feeds The prosperity of the beltway. That's why I call it the imperial city And everything in the imperial city today is compromised But most especially the news media I was just struck to tell you the truth I was appalled when I heard the great guru, you know in the pecking order of things There are some people that are felt to be the real thoughtful leaders of the media today One of them is for reads the karya And when I heard him say on cnn thursday night As they were showing in the background all the flashing from the bombs hitting and so forth that tonight Donald trump became president Because he was foolish and rash enough to launch an unconstitutional illegal unnecessary Pointless attack on an airfield in syria It sort of brought it all together and told me really what we're up against And why things like what ron paul is doing and what mesas is doing is so critically important Because there is a totally different view on what's going on in the world If you get your lens right, and if you're not part of this overwhelming group think consensus that is literally Suffocating the machinery of government the machinery of the mainstream media In washington today, and that's why we're at this point. I think that we're at I also wanted before I get into a little more substance. I want to acknowledge How much I admire and how grateful I am for all The work in behalf of the cause of peace and that's really what it is That ron paul has done over so many decades I consider him really a national treasure A person that i've admired for the last 40 years since we both sat together in the congress in 1978 And the interesting thing about that is that we were both kind of free market rabid free market types And we sat way in the back benches and we were being totally ignored by everyone Because they thought that what we were You know focused on entirely was the free market, but actually We were working on an issue that is the issue of the day Ron was really at that point a closet peacenik And little did they understand that I was a 30 year old congressman at the time in 10 years earlier I'd been out on the barricades as a member of sds protesting the war in vietnam And really trying to disrupt the machine and we have been going in the wrong direction ever since and here we are today And uh, I'm uh, you know more convinced than ever that what we were saying About the aggressive Expansionist the interventionist foreign policy Then in 1968 that led to the folly of vietnam Is even more true today and that's why history I think is so important perspective A lot of you probably travel if you've ever been to vietnam you have to go to hanoi If you're traveling to southeast asia or go to saigon and ask yourself what in the hell were we doing Putting 500 000 young americans Billions of dollars Dropping on the country from one end to the other napalm and every other kind of horrible thing out of the sky Why were we doing that back in 1960s? What was the point there is no trace of anything accomplished any purpose any valid Uh objective for uh 50 years later in fact, uh, vietnam is now becoming Major supplier of goods in services to the united states So, um, uh, I just uh, think that maybe we need to have a little perspective Historical perspective and I have to say that in light of the event two days ago. I had to change The title of my speech It originally was the deep state and the donald And my the whole idea was that in some ways he was a victim already of the deep state They were trying to relitigate the election That's what all of this russia gate hysteria is about And I thought they're not going to win even if they wound and Undermine him badly and even destroy his presidency Because at least he's an impetuous bomb thrower that would Help to begin to uh, that's what the word I used was discredit in unmask this huge surveillance state That has grown up in the hysteria after 9 11 Well, little did I know that suddenly Donald trump has been taken hostage by the deep state And before we knew it He's ending up being the tool of the deep state And that's really the topic that I want to address today. How did this happen? How did it happen so fast in a few days that A president that they were literally after attempting to drive from the very oval office How did it end up that he did the undertook the act that was so rash so uncalled for Even after by the way Everybody's familiar with all the tweets that he put out in 2 13 when obama was on the brink after the false flag attack in August you read all of them. Don't do it. How can you get involved in the civil war when there are two sides? And you want to fight both of them? It's none of our business. They haven't attacked us. There is no possible danger The only thing you could do is compound and exacerbate the most complex sectarian battle Conflict civil war that we've ever seen so he was right then He was right last week when he sent his secretary of state out to say You know regime change is done. That was one of the fundamental propositions of his campaign regime change doesn't work That's not our role. Obviously And so what Here we are in three days. The regime change is behind throwing overboard He had his even his neocon You know Ambassador to the un saying the same thing and I since nicky hayley basically reads out of the playbook That samantha powers left behind from the Obama administration I'm sure it was tough for her to get out the words That we're not gonna we've decided that not to take a sod out But now here we are and everything has changed and he's back in the groove So the question that I asked to myself was well, what is the purpose Of this attack After two days no investigation Of what really happened in idlib province and that little town Where obviously it looks like they hit a ammo dump and there could have well been and there's plenty of Suggestions that there were both regular ammunition and chemical weapons being stored there But what was he possibly trying to accomplish if it's not regime change if it's not taking out the entire Air force and army of the syrians. What is he trying to accomplish and the only thing that I can think of Is that and they've said it Assad had to be punished And so You know the question comes to your mind Who appointed donald trump to be the global spanker in chief? for any dictator or Leader of a country that misbehaves And that is not a basis for a foreign policy That's not a valid basis for attacking any country And if you want to be spanker in chief, why don't you take a look at the Leader of egypt who was in the oval office a week or two ago He's he's murdered thousands of his political opponents since he illegally Took power in a coup several years ago If you uh want to be spanker in chief And compel behavior and this is the thing that Fareed zikariya was saying finally the president has realized that there are standards in the world And it's the job the united states to enforce those standards And if occasionally we have to use military power, let's do it He was applauding that well then where are the standards in this horrendous civil war that's going on in yemen Uh, we are arming the soddies with every kind of destructive device bomb missile drone that there is They wouldn't have the firepower that they do with all this u.s. Supplied Uh, munitions so far 10 000 civilians Have been casualties four thousand killed men women and children weddings and all the rest of it 6 000 injured Many of them from cluster bombs which are supplied by textron to the saudi government that is using it on the civilian population of yemen So if you want to be the spanker in chief bring in the king of saudi arabia and uh, you know Give him a whack or two the point is it makes no sense There's no justification for it and yet that's about the only thing that i can think of That donald trump may be up to so The question that i want to uh, kind of try to answer a little bit Is how in 77 days Did this outlaw renegade Guy who said a few things in the campaign that made sense like let's make a deal with putin We don't have to have a war with putin. Let's get out of the middle east regime change has been a disaster We've got rubble and destroyed states and Millions of refugees and blowback of every time everywhere. He said all this how in 77 days Is he doing something as stupid As immoral as short-sighted as impulsive as starting a major conflict Uh, uh with the Assad government and getting exactly into harm's way With russia and all of its allies that are on the ground there the iranians uh, hezbollah and all the rest of them How did this happen in 77 days? And i think what i would like to do is suggest That the deep state or the warfare state or whatever you want to call it Is gotten so massive the military industrial congressional surveillance complex and so forth That it envelops everything That enters the imperial city that enters the white house the oval office And therefore the kind of challenge and problem and threat really that we face from this thing Is far greater than almost anybody could imagine if they could even take down Donald trump Within such a short period of time now, let's just say how big it is i call it the trillion dollar monster And that's because if you take the 600 billion that's uh admitted to in the defense budget You add about 50 billion for your security assistance of foreign aid and all the rest of it you add another 70 billion that goes into a homeland security and an extension of the warfare state at home 180 billion for Veterans and after all we are we're spending 180 billion dollars on veterans Because we've had all these wars since vietnam since the last 50 years That have been pointless and we've ended up with all of these young men and women who need medical care or compensation or pensions and so forth none of that Ever should have happened so charge it to the warfare state Add a little bit of carry cost for the debt which is now 20 billion And you got a trillion dollar monster with funds flowing in every direction And especially in the imperial city You have a 75 billion complex for the 17 agencies of the intelligence community Now the difference between what i call the intelligence complex And the old fashion notion of the military industrial Is that at least the military industrial complex was spread all over the world and spread all over the country We had bases all over the country defense contractors all over 200 000 forces abroad that shouldn't be there and so forth But when you get to the intelligence community, it is concentrated massed in the greater metropolitan area of dc I think there's two or three or 400 000 Contractors or direct employees if you take the 75 billion budget of the cia at nasa and all the rest of them 50 billion of it goes to contracts and so you have all these huge Contracting companies that are paying people big big salaries not gs 16 or 18 salaries But huge salaries you create that entire mass Concentration of people all needing a justification For a continuation of the flow of all this money. That's why when you go into washington I don't go to washington that much anymore congressman, but when I do Compared to what I saw when I started there in 1970 or even when I left in 1985 The prosperity is amazing and you say to yourself Where is all this prosperity this glass and steel and all these new hotels and restaurants and all of this? you know Fancy stuff coming from in a city that has no Manufacturing has no industry. Where does it come from? It's coming from the 75 billion dollar Intelligence complex that sprawled all over the entire metro area So uh part of that obviously is the group think tanks Part of that is the media that's housed there. I mean wolf blitzer Can you stand to listen to another night of wolf blitzer? drooling over uh, you know the next uh Occupation or intervention or a stage of the war. They're all down there embedded In that horrible environment that's been created Now my point is That if there were some kind of existential threat To the very future of our society of our democracy of our system some horrible immense powerful uh Terminal threat uh to our existence. Maybe that would be a justification for what we have But I want to spend a couple minutes telling you That the real secret and we need to get it out and sort of preach the gospel is We have no serious industrial technological military threat anywhere on the planet Instead of an existential threat We have less of a threat than we've had since 1917 when wilson foolishly Put us into the first world war And let's just tick off what is out there The first one obviously is russia And you know, that's a joke If they're going to land on the shores of new jersey, they would need vast power projection capability aircraft carriers and suites of Capacity to let I know i'm being facetious But the point is None of that is remotely possible because they've got one 50-year-old aging smoke belching aircraft carrier That's on duty in the eastern Mediterranean and probably couldn't get out of the straitsage of alter if it had to That's it So how do they threaten the security or the safety of anybody in america? Unless you think Putin who is the ultimate chess player the cool hand luke Of the global, uh, you know seeing today is foolish enough to risk uh, nuclear retaliation By attacking us first And have all of russia turned into a parking lot The point is we have had the nuclear deterrent on our submarine Trident submarines more than enough ever since i was there fighting the defense build up in 1980 We don't need any more money There's nothing that the russians are going to do that remotely threatens us And as a matter of fact just to give you some Feel for how silly this whole damn thing is I'm actually uh Unfortunate enough to live in new york city and uh on the 19th floor of a very nice apartment building On the east river And when I look out from my balcony I can see the queens on the other side and I look south and I can see brooklyn I look north on one side. There's harlem and on another side There's the broncs and also I can see the entirety of russia From the balcony of my apartment in new york city now i'm not doing a sarah palin on you Okay, i'm not talking about the cyberian landmass I'm talking about the fact that the gdp that I can see from my balcony of new york metro Is 1.6 trillion and the gdp of russia is 1.3 trillion in other words The entire economy of russia is not even as big as new york city It's one seventh of the gdp of the united states russia is Mainly a huge hydrocarbon field With a few Nickel mines 100 million acres of wheat And an aging workforce that has a great fondness for vodka And other distractions so the point is there is nothing there that could ever generate a threat Or the military capability to Harm us now china is the same thing You know If you think about it Do you really worry at night? That china is going to send Some missiles or a fleet of aircraft to over to over the pacific In order to bomb four thousand walmarts in america I mean the point is their economy would collapse Within six months if they didn't have this global bloated global system Of exports and trade That's what the whole red ponzi is predicated upon And if they want to build sand castles in the south china sea more power to them But they aren't a threat to us and frankly they're not a threat to any of their neighbors either because they depend on a huge supply Of raw materials coming up through the south china sea into their ports And all the intermediate products that come Yeah, you know from all the nearby countries like south korea taiwan malaysia and so forth Now my point today is Can't we learn a lesson from the demise of the of the soviet union the 80s You know one of the things I had to do over and over when I was in the budget office was fight this massive build up of defense Spending that reagan got convinced to do When the soviet union was dying on its own accord because it was predicated on a centralized socialist Controlled economy that was falling apart and the only thing we really needed to do was just wait it out And sure enough it did it wasn't the reagan build up It wasn't star wars all the money that went into that reagan build up ended up ironically Going into conventional weapons. It didn't go into strategic defense. It didn't go into strategic offense it went into Tanks and it went into a 600 ship navy and more aircraft carriers and more you know Cruise missiles and tomahawks and so forth all the things that subsequently got used for the wars of invasion and occupation That we never should have undertaken. But my point is let's learn from that mistake and realize that China is a red ponzi of historic proportion That 20 years ago the debt of all of china was a half trillion dollars today. It's 30 trillion That you don't blow up the debt of a system by 60 fold 60 x in two decades and create a frenzy of building and speculating and borrowing and Gambling really and expect the system to be stable sustainable When there are no market mechanisms to discipline it or there's no honesty in the system since they all lie Up and down the channel. So my point is we only need to wait it out We don't have to get excited about the china threat either And frankly, we don't have to get that excited about the terrorism threat either And if we wanted to do something about it, that's the third item We ought to stop bombing and droning and occupying because it's the blowback from that That's created. What is what does exist today? as As a terrorist threat and I think all of you know that because all you have to do is ask yourself Before 1990, how many terrorist incidents do you do you remember? Not many and most of them had to do with inner murals between the palestinians and the israelis It had nothing to do with us. It had nothing to do with Europe And all of a sudden allegedly were more imperiled than ever before in history Well, where did all this come from? It started with gulf war one. What in the world were we doing? trying to argue Resolve or intervene in a fight between the emir of kuwait who was directionally drilling into saddam's oil field And saddam was pissed off and pretty soon He decided to take over the oil field and the next thing we knew george bush said this will not stand We had 500 000 troops on the sands of saudi arabia the Mujahideen that we had armed and trained to fight the soviets became offended because we were you know, we were Defacing the holy lands and the next thing we knew we ended up where we are today But the point is stop The intervention the blowback will die out The threat will eventually disappear. But beyond that they're not coming over here Anyway, and I just have to get this point across. I had it in my book that I wrote on trump And that is I got very upset during the campaign when he was talking about terrors Everywhere lurking behind every bush. So I went and checked it out And it turns out if you take this time frame, which is 15 years Between 9 11 and that last unfortunate incident from the done by the lone wolves in san bernadino Which I think was december 2014 15 in that period 420 americans Were killed by lightning Okay, and six americans civilians Were killed by terrorist acts outside of military bases So that gives you a little bit of perspective about the fact That 99.9 percent of the american people in the towns and cities and Villages and farms of america are not imperiled by terrorists And this this huge massive System that we've created to combat them Is part of the problem not part of the solution and uh, you know, so it leads to The system to keep itself alive Leads to uh, what I call endless false narratives Because if there isn't an enemy if there isn't an imminent threat If there isn't danger lurking everywhere, even if it's more from lightning than it is from terrorists then Over time it becomes hard to justify all of this money That is being wasted in this massive system You know, I want to mention one or two because this is one of the things I do in my blog And I think it's important that we educate people About what is taken for granted as truths In the day-to-day mainstream media Which is totally distorting of the facts and is creating a false case for this massive system that led donald trump To try to bomb an airfield, which even that didn't happen You know one of them is russia is an expansionist power And if they can't get to the new jersey shores, they're going to take over all of europe And how do we know that well because allegedly they occupied crimea All right. Now here are the facts on crimea Catherine the great bought crimea for hard gold money in 1783 from the turks Who were desperate for cash? It was a stalwart part of russia for 200 years Sevastopol the main port became the home port for the black sea fleet the heart of the russian navy under zars and commissars alike And it was not until 1956 after being In the heart of the russian empire in fact You know the charge of the light brigade occurred in crimea And it was the occupying invaders who were charging the english and it was the russian patriots who were defending the homeland that's The the point but it wasn't until 1956 After the succession of stalin was resolved and khrushchev had killed off his two rivals And khrushchev as you remember was a ukrainian So in a night of drunken celebration with his comrades from Kiev and the ukraine They decided they would transfer in the soviet empire crimea from russia to the ukraine That's how it happens. So we're supposed to start a war today in order to compel russia to return crimea because of You know A invasion that we helped or a coup that we helped Start in 2014 my point is Crimea has been part of russia And provided them with a warm water port for 173 years Which is longer than california has been part of the united states when we got our warm water port You know in In california The point is there are a lot of these that we could talk about One other that i just want to mention and then i'll take some questions is You know we're constantly being told that they need these billions of dollars to do the policing On the homeland all this homeland security stuff because there are terror cells everywhere But i think congressman you've probably looked at this but the fact is that about 90 of these so-called busts of terror cells Are fbi stings and one of my great Anyone who wants to get educated on the terrorist threat Needs to only go back and watch paul annouman and robert redford's movie Of 40 years ago called the sting and you will see exactly what's going on today But most of them are sting operations and the latest one was and i just mentioned this in closing The latest one was in kansas city Where the fbi agents cultivated for several weeks A young man who was so destitute so out of it such a loser Who his wife had left him and had a young son? That the fbi gay had to give him 30 dollars and babysit his son While he went to walmart To buy a list of stuff that they had given him like copper wires and battery And batteries and fertilizer And a few other incriminating things now this may be an extreme case But the point is this is part of what i call This false narrative that's constantly going on so The bottom line i guess of my point today is that maybe there's a silver lining in this latest Capture of trump by the deep state this utterly stupid attack on syria In that is maybe it will help revive A coalition anti-war coalition in the congress Like the one that i started with way back in 1968 when both non interventionist like senator akon from vermont and real Doves from the democrat side came together and basically put johnson out of business stopped the war And ended the madness Maybe now that the liberals and the so-called progressives will come back to life. I mean they've been essentially Sidelined during the whole obama era because anything he did they had to justify But if we have a opportunity now to tell trump That you can't do this without congressional authorization And a real debate begins in congress, which i think is beginning to happen Maybe we can revive some kind of resistance some kind of opposition To the madness that's been going on and i in this Setting i want to particularly commend rand paul For the tremendous leadership the astute and brilliant You know representation of this position that he's doing day after day in the senate And he goes on the media and he just leaves them totally flummox because he in a calm way Is laying out the facts of the case And so i consider rand just like his father To be one of the great patriots of america in fact To sum it up when you think of what rand is willing to do To defend the constitution and the right of the right way For the foreign policy to be conducted to defend the position of Non-intervention and a more peaceful foreign policy He is willing to go so far as that i've read this morning that he's trying to form a coalition For bringing this to the senate floor with senator pocahontas from massachusetts And that i i would say that's going a mile and beyond So at least there's some glimmerings of hope But uh frankly the group think is killing us The warfare state is uh suffocating uh washington The war machine is bankrupting and draining the fiscal and economic resources of america And the hour is getting late so uh maybe there's a chance to turn it around and maybe Inadvertently donald trump gave us that opportunity two days ago. Thank you very much