 Action Main's Spring Gathering. My name is Devon Grayson Wallace. Thanks. I'm a member of the board of Peace Action Main, a statewide group mobilizing to end war and occupation since 1982. Peace Action Main is an affiliate of Peace Action National and is the state of Maine's oldest peace organization. Another plug, if you enjoy tonight's talk or the camaraderie or intend to come to next year's talk or wish you had participated in our delicious dinner from the works, I ask you to please consider donating or joining Peace Action Main as a member. For the price of one meal, $35 for an individual or $10 for a limited income, you can get a free dinner at our annual meeting and you can support our efforts at local organizing and education for peace and justice. Additionally, if you're interested in joining the board of Peace Action Main, please come see me after the talk as we would love to have more members on the Peace Action Main board. Finally, I would like to introduce Reverend Richard Kilmer, a Presbyterian minister who has served in several religious national organizations. Most recently, he was the executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, an interfaith organization committed to ending U.S. sponsored torture in U.S. policy, practice, and culture. Previously, among many other roles, he served as program director of the Church's Center for Theology and Public Policy at the Wesley Theological Seminary, as director of environmental justice at the National Council of the Churches of Christ, and was the first director of the Presbyterian peacemaking program. In retirement, he continues to work on the issue of climate change with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, and he is currently the project director for the Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare. So please join me in welcoming Reverend Richard Kilmer to the stage. I appreciate your work. I appreciate the work of Peace Action. Actually, the work that I do on Drone Warfare is actually done through the Coalition on Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey. Bob Moore is the executive director there. I get to introduce Colonel Wilkerson and it feels like my honor to be able to do that. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was the chief of staff for General Colin Powell, when the general was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and when he served as U.S. Secretary of State. He is now the distinguished visiting professor of government and public policy at the nation's oldest public university, which is the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he's taught for the past 14 years. Previously, while serving in the U.S. Army for 31 years, he also taught at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island and the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Virginia. After retiring from military service, he taught in the Honors Program at the George Washington University in D.C. for six years. He calls for a blueprint, and he will say a lot more about this, of how world leaders have to cooperate and coordinate for a safe and secure world. He warns of the military industrial complex, of the congressional military industrial complex, as an enormous power that is basically unchecked. As profitable as war is for military contractors, forever war has got us into bankruptcy. The question is, how do we get out of this fiscal mess? And it's only going to happen if Americans say that they're fed up with it. That the only way to disestablish this mess is for the American people to get extremely angry about it and demand it. My privilege to introduce to you my friend, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, and he and I have worked together on the drone project, and it's great to have him as a colleague. I'm going to read something that I think is very, very important, very, very apt, very, very timely, even though it's over half a century old. This is a speech by a five-star general, arguably the most important general other than possibly his colleague, George Catholic Marshall, in the United States in the 20th century. If it hadn't been for Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall, we probably would be Sprachensy-Deutsch right now, or some other nasty outcome of what was probably the greatest conflagration the world has ever seen. We call it World War II. This is not a speech when he walked out of the White House in January 1961, which everyone ought to know, and many do. Very few people know this speech. This is a speech he gave in 1953, about this time of year, April the 16th, 1953, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors at that time, a very powerful group of people. At that time, they were not owned by six wealthy oligarchs. At that time, they were independent. They had come out of World War II with such men as Hanson Baldwin and Drew Pearson and Walter Lippman and Ernie Powell, though Ernie didn't make it out. They were people who cared about their responsibility to inform this democracy as to what was happening to it, particularly what was happening perpetrated by its leadership. This was the idea of the Founding Fathers. They didn't have the concept of the media that we have today, but they certainly had a concept of, as Jefferson said quite eloquently, facts battling themselves, literally fighting in the square, in the public square, and the truth coming out of that. This is 1953 Dwight Eisenhower, in what was called by him the chance for peace speech, a very apt title for your group. This is one portion of it. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone, it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this, a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the threatening cloud of war, it is humanity hanging from across a barn. I want to modify that speech just a bit. I want to give it the way it should be given at this moment. You'll note some of the language stays the same, but some changes. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. Those who are cold and are not clothed, those who would challenge and defeat climate change and not just deny while knowing the full ravages will come later after they're dead. And those who would like to have a college education but who cannot afford the equivalent of a home mortgage on their back when they graduate. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of the laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of the children, perhaps even the existence of the human race given climate change and the ever present existence and growing numbers of nuclear weapons. The cost of one F-35 lightning strike fighter is 340 modern homes in an average American city. And the cost of the entire F-35 program is seven and a half million college educations at the best public universities in America with no cost to the student. The cost of a single Ford class aircraft carrier is 100 modern hospitals in small towns across America. The cost of the U.S. Marine Corps Osprey program is enough solar paneling to provide electricity for New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles for half a century. And the cost of the U.S. Army's recruiting program, recruiting program last year alone would buy 20 years supply of the most in-use medications for over 10,000 average elderly citizens. And let one repeat those final lines of ikes and modify them only slightly. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of today's endless wars, it is humanity hanging from across America. Five Star General. No man in America knew the military, knew the Defense Department, like Dwight Eisenhower. To his granddaughter Susan, he said one day in the Oval Office, God help America if anybody ever sits here who doesn't understand the military the way I do. He was absolutely correct. Today we have become what Eisenhower's worst nightmares predicted in his farewell address. We have become beholden to that complex that this year marked its greatest year in history. It sold more weapons than anybody else in the world at a greater total billion-dollar figure than ever before. We are the merchants of death for seven billion people. Not for that alone, but certainly as a reason or a fallout from that, we now have, by polling data, three and a half billion people in the world who say that the number one threat to their and their children's future is the United States of America. Dick Cheney, you have succeeded. You always said you wanted to be feared, not loved or respected. Well, you succeeded. Half the world now hates our guts. People in Pakistan, you would think they would hate India, right? Number one enemy. Number one threat to Pakistan is India. No, 88% think the United States is the number one threat to their future. Egypt, 80%. Korea, a signatory ally with the United States. 67% of the people think we're the number one threat to their future. This is an incredible situation we've created, but it is not just because of the warfare statement. It has other complicating factors. One of the most profound of those factors is the fact that we now sit in a year and at the end of a decade or two, that marks the greatest maldistribution of wealth in the history of this Republic, worse than 1929. It's not the top 10%. Hell, some of you may be in the top 10%. It's the top .001%. 400 families in America have the gross domestic product of Brazil. 400 families. Think about that for a minute. And this is not income. This is wealth. The difference is stunning when you think about it. You probably, like me, work for income. You labor for income. That's what about 70% plus of this nation does. These people don't work for income. Their wealth creates more wealth and more wealth and more wealth. That's all it creates is wealth. That's called capital. That capital is now taxed at an overall less rate than your income that you make from your sweat and your hard work and your tears. All they do is invest that capital and make money. Same in France, same in Germany, same in England. It is the worst it has ever been since tax records have been kept. For us, that's about 1912. For Europe, it goes back to the French Revolution. It is terrible. A Chinese scholar once said, you can talk about anything in the world and usually have a decent conversation, maybe throw a few chairs, maybe a rock or two, but you can usually debate until, until you talk about the distribution of wealth and then you better get your gun. Remember what Dr. Martin Luther King began to talk about right before he was assassinated in Memphis? He began to talk about the Vietnam War and its stupidity and wealth and the distribution thereof. That's what Lujasun meant when he said get your guns when you talk about the distribution of wealth. A senator said to me the other day, Larry, he dismissed everyone from his office except me and him. Even dismissed his own staff. He looked at his watch and he said I've got a vote in a few minutes but I want to ask you a question. The question is going to beg your military expertise. That's the reason I dismissed everyone else plus I don't want anybody to know I'm asking this question which is why I'm not telling you the senator's name. He said Larry, I'm going to paint you a scenario. Scenario is this. This was about the time that it looked as if the Republicans were going to lose at least one of the houses. They subsequently did of course. He said let's just posit that we lose both houses of Congress or one house of Congress and let's say that the articles of impeachment in the house which are already there grow in support, detail, and power. And let's just say for a moment that they get to the point where they attract even members, this was a Republican, they attract even members of our party. And let's just say that we get to the point we did with Richard Nixon. And we take the leadership of the Congress over to the White House and we lay the articles of impeachment down and we say to the President of the United States look you've got two choices. You can walk out of here just as Richard Nixon did resigning from the office and we will leave you alone. You just go your merry way. We won't even turn you over to New York. Or you can fight us and stay and we will prosecute these articles of impeachment and we will remove you from office and will prosecute you and your entire family to the full extent of the law. I'm listening to this wrapped. Then he looks at me and he says now here's my question. When Trump calls his legions to the streets with their guns what will the U.S. military do? I said senator you put me in a real box. I could give you an academic answer and tell you that the enlisted ranks basically voted for Trump. The NCO ranks were split and the officer ranks 20 to 60, 20 to 80, something like that. But I can tell you that I don't think the American military will shoot Americans. He said well that's comforting to an extent because basically the FBI tells me and he's right on this that Trump's base owns 90 percent of the guns in America which the FBI will also tell you number around 350 million. I own 13 guns myself. So that's not an exorbitant figure. It sort of reflects where we are today with all these school shootings and everything else and I wonder every time I wake up and hear about a new one when we're going to do anything about that. But it it got me to thinking he had to leave he had to get we're walking down the corridor he's going to vote and I'm I'm walking with him for a few minutes and then he walks away and I'm thinking you know this is a sitting senator feeling this way are we really at that point are we at the point where that sort of thing could happen no we aren't that's the real issue we aren't for whatever reason we aren't because you can't get America that riled up nor could Trump he could get some of the Charlottesville crowd out there some of the Nazis some of the David Dukes and so forth and maybe they might do something but the FBI'd be enough to stop that if you could get the FBI so it's not a question really of that sort of a challenge I don't think the challenge is waking Americans up we are losing our democracy if we haven't already lost it in terms of it being a democracy we are sacrificing everything that that big conflict that I just quoted the iconic five-star general from gained for us if you go back to 1946 and 47 you see some very smart people sitting around a table and then in other places like the new Pentagon like across the hill in the congress the senate and the house you see them in the white house they're trying to grapple with this if you go back and you read the archives you understand that there were some people who understood what was coming and the challenge it was going to present and they tried to put down in statute the 1947 national security act they tried to put down in statute a mechanism an institutional fabric we call it the deep state today that would both manage this new overwhelming power we had which they knew outstripped Rome Rome never even dreamt of the power that we had in 1945 we had 50 percent of the world's GDP we made 55,000 airplanes in a single year we can barely make 20 in a single year now we had 7,000 ships in the army we had over 14,000 ships in the navy we have 270 today we were the colossus of the world not only that the rest of the world accounted was prostrate France Germany England Japan we had fire bomb Tokyo burned it to a frazzle and then just to add paying the misery we dropped two atomic bombs on them we were unprecedented in our power so these people got together and they said just as important as that day in Philadelphia that month that summer where they crafted the constitution they sat down and they crafted this statutory framework very carefully in an attempt to maintain our democracy while at the same time protecting it from external threats they made a huge mistake and that mistake was leaving alive something we had never had in our history colonial or national an industrial complex aimed at war Franklin Roosevelt created it and or arguably had rationale for creating it after all we were going to fight or arguably the most efficient effective army the world had ever seen the Wehrmacht but he should have disbanded it after the war we had never had a standing industrial base for war now it eats us alive not only does it produce f-35 strike fighters that cost 135 million dollars a copy a million dollars for the helmet the pilot wears but they don't work we actually have a defense base that charges us maximum money for crappy products no one's more aware of that than the military and they simply don't know what to do about it because the leadership of the military has no moral courage whatsoever they just simply keep going along with it and they keep saying give me more money i actually heard a chief of service the other day say something like this this is almost a direct quote those damn taxpayers just have to pony up give them more money look at your army your army 40 percent of it comes from seven states you can name them one of those places where a lot of them come from is the interior of main i've had conversations with susan collins angus king about this the interior of oklahoma west virginia the poorest states in the union produce half or better of your land forces they're bribed to come into the service they are the third and fourth quintiles of america you don't see princeton graduates going into the military cornell graduates with me mary graduates maybe a few from rotc but nothing else they're not there so what happens america has no skin in the game no skin in the game at all i can go to kansas and ask people if they can go to a map and find afghanistan and they'll look at me and say what what is afghanistan this is no joke let alone say something like jaboody where's jaboody where's the straight old moves where's aiden where's this war you called yemen greatest humanitarian disaster since world war two cholera outbreak unprecedented yemen where is that these are actual responses across america we don't know who's mohammed bin salman the bloodthirstiest greatest sponsor of terrorism on the face of the earth with whom you are allied prosecuting a war in yemen that he's losing while at the same time destroying the security mechanism that we created in the gulf called the gulf cooperation council by going against his arch enemy in katar so we have everything we've ever worked for in the middle east at great treasurer and blood mind you going to hell in a handbag and we gave it the kick to do so with the invasion of iraq in 2003 and as we make mistake after mistake after mistake a guy in muskau by the name of blood mere putin comes along behind us and picks up the pieces and capitalizes on them so who's the victor in syria right now russia iran and bashar al-asad i say fine that's the only way you're going to get stability back so let's get out let's leave and bring stability back let bashar al-asad bring stability back to syria so his people can come home no we have mounted now another covert operation to try and thwart the political agreement that iran turkey russia and damascus are working on just as we have mounted our third coup in caracas we tried to throw out ugo chavez in 2002 don't refute me on that i was there and we failed so we tried about a year ago to throw nicholas maduro out he's a little more incompetent than ugo chavez so that was going to be easy 48 hours ago jena has spelled the director of the cia told the president united states it's over one guido and leopoldo lopez will be in charge tomorrow morning don't worry mr president it's all over the coup is going to be successful it wasn't now we have a potential for civil war in minnesota all because of the united states iran what are we doing in iran we had a nuclear agreement we we had taken iran from having 5000 centrifuges to having almost none to having no processed material to having a inspection regime that was so dominant i would never have accepted it had i been a state power with any pride and dignity we had their plutonium producing mechanisms going down the road concrete filled and so forth now trump is even working on that by restricting the people in the world who are working on that why because he wants iran to violate the nuclear agreement why because he wants to go to war with iran maybe trump doesn't maybe john bolton does i don't know we're going to see this incredible fight probably between his national security advisor and himself i think what trump wants is a kim jong-un moment moment he wants to negotiate with president ruhani and foreign ministers areef he wants to be able to sit down in some foreign city geneva and he wants to jump up from the table and say see i told you i could get a better deal than obama i've just gotten it and it includes ballistic missiles and terrorism and all this other kind of stuff i can i got a better deal i've got a better deal that's what he wants to do but john bolton wants to go to war i know john bolton i sat in john bolton's office with the assistant secretary of state for east asia east asia in the pacific we were in there because the secretary told us to go in there and tell john to shut up about north korea he was violating white house policy we did not want a war with korea john wanted a war with korea when i finished telling john what a war with korea would be like in the soul area with hundreds of thousands of americans there dead wounded soul of fire paschineo ypres sudan type artillery around there yes the south would win we would win ultimately but we'd take a lot of casualties and one of the most modern forward-looking cities in the world would be virtually destroyed and john looked at me and jim kelly and he said i don't do war i do policy you guys do war we knew it was stupid to continue the conversation but we did we did tell him to shut up did he shut up no he went out and said cuba had biological four-level facilities and biological warfare capability he went out and said bashar al-asad had all these different things and a nuclear program and he was lying about all of that because john doesn't care about the truth all john cares about is getting what he wants which is american sovereignty unthreatened by anyone on the face of the earth that's why he doesn't like treaties he doesn't like the united nations he doesn't like agreements he just likes power you have to meet someone like this to understand what i'm talking about someone like richard bruce cheney the one criticism i had of the movie vice i told the script writer the screenwriter who was also the maker of the movie i said you know i know why you do this for aesthetic balance you dealt with dick cheney's family his wife and his daughter especially the lesbian daughter to give the movie some balance i criticized that he said why i said because he's an evil man you didn't need that balance he's a totally evil man and he is john bolton same kind of person remember erin burr remember benedict arnold at least they had excuses john does not have an excuse john is just what we say in the military an asshole and he's national security advisor to a president who doesn't know his butt from a hole in the ground so there's lots of room you see what's happening with cuba and with venezuela it's not trump it's marco rubio who just salivates over the prospect of getting back to cuba and re-establishing batista's regime and getting his property back and his family property back and it's rick scott from florida who salivates over 300 000 venezuelans whom he thinks he's going to deliver to trump so the 27 electoral votes from florida will be his wherever we've been down this path before you know who counted the hanging chads for george w bush in florida in 2000 john bolton we've been down this road we know these people they're the same people and yet and yet we do nothing the country marches on to yet another war another trillion dollar fiasco another bloodbath for young men and women who are signed up because they were bribed to do so that's not to disparage them at all their patriots they're doing their job the best they can but we're destroying them we're destroying their families divorce rate off the charts and the services now suicide rate off the charts and the services now more post-traumatic stress than you'd ever imagined why would you not think a young lady or a young man whom you gave 40 000 to sign a contract to from west virginia never seen that much money in their life nor expected ever to why would you think coming from a broken family undoubtedly would come home and be sane and sound after murdering people in afghanistan or iraq why is pts off the charts they shouldn't be in there in the first place we have let this happen all across the country we have let this happen we have left this maldistribution of wealth happen we have let people gerry rigged the states to where only republicans can be elected we have let people do things all across this country that destroy our democracy what did tennessee just do tennessee just passed the most draconian law no supreme court would ever support it but this one will mark my words this one will that essentially says you can't vote if your skin's not lily white and you're not an opus day catholic or whatever look at that law it's incredible if you go out if you go out and organize 100 tennesseeans to register them and vote them and you make a single mistake on any of those forms you will go to jail how many times you ever put 100 forms together with social security numbers addresses telephone numbers everything you didn't make a mistake on one of the forms that's what that law says this is an effort by the republicans in charge in tennessee to disenfranchise every voter in tennessee who won't vote for them north carolina i just came from ashville i heard the same story down there they showed me some of their districts the gerrymandering is so blatant that you'd think any judge anywhere would reverse that almost instantly no north carolina is a perfect place to go to see the united states in microcosm 50 50 50 50 percent thinks that trump is great and 50 percent thinks he should be taken out and impeached immediately it's an incredible experience to go there and go from one campus to another one county from another and see this it's extraordinary not for nothing was north carolina the place where the ci flew its planes on the rendition interrogation and torture program about 140 people were rendered out of a taxpayer funded municipal airport in north carolina they participated in torture they participated in war crimes they perpetrated war crimes and half of north carolina hates that they did that and the other half says well it was in the name of national security yeah right and guess who's sitting on the senate select committee for intelligence chairmanship right now richard burr from north carolina guess who kept the 6000 page report the senate select committee did under diane feinstein on torture out of the public domain richard burr guess who's hiding all the people who tortured and committed war crimes richard burr north carolina i wouldn't have their problem for all the tea in china i don't see how they deal with it politically because it's 50 50 one minute to get a democratic governor the legislature republican just you know just knows everything he does just i'll pass a law you oh pass a law you did that pass a law then they get a republican governor and a democratic legislature same thing stasis nothing happens meanwhile the citizens of north carolina are ill served but the 50 percent that loves the trump like effect loves that situation they don't see beyond what's happening to just like many of the people i encounter all across the country from ohio to idaho don't see what's happening to them and don't understand what's happening to them partly because the media's failed partly because their governments have failed i'm in idaho northern idaho court elaine get a telephone call i'm out there fly fishing i don't want to talk politics i get a telephone call boon hideen he says he's a swedish american he says come over and see me i know he's a really wealthy real estate developer in court elaine so i want to go see him i go see him he says you're a republican i'm a republican we want to throw the bastards and boysy out i said why do you want to throw the republicans and boysy out he says because they hate clean water and we love clean water and they hate public lands and we love public lands i said i'm with you let's work we'll throw them out and we're working to throw them out that's got to be done in every state every state has to take this kind of action you have to wake up and say i'm getting rid of these people susan collins let me just tell you something about susan collins i'm in talking to susan collins about the greatest freaking humanitarian disaster on the face of the earth at the time yemen and she says to me it's a niche issue and i go center you got to be kidding me and she realized right away she made an impolitic remark so you know her staff jumped in and she jumped in every but that's that's what we're dealing with that's what we're dealing with it's incredible i went into another senator's office this one a republican and i started talking to him about jimny so we we have to have saudi arabia we have to have saudi arabia they buy our treasury bonds they buy our debt we have to have saudi arabia why senator why would you want to ally yourself with the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world with the real problem in the middle east with all the poisonous future that that represents why it's just basic they're they're the enemy of iran why would you think saudi arabia would be an enemy of iran this is a very interesting conversation do you know why i said senator because iran has a modicum of democracy they have elections they may pick people to run but they still have a modicum of democracy democracy in any fashion shape or form is anathema to riyadh those tyrants cut people's heads off with axes who believe in things like voting they are our allies one of the reasons they're our allies is the most difficult intractable problem in that region it's called israel and it's called israel particularly under bb netanyahu and the ultra right-wing government he runs which is in essence a zionist government for the future of israel expanding until it can expand no more we're allied with that go back and read the report the joint chiefs of staff prepared for harry truman before he recognized israel in 1948 i read it to my students sometimes so they can see that at times we're pretty smart because what the chairman of the joint chiefs and the joint chiefs and george marshall predicted was exactly what has happened that we would become so enamored of so attached to so buddy buddy with this little government in the eastern Mediterranean that they would begin to determine our fate and that's what they're doing gideon levy of haaretz said recently that u.s middle east policy is not made in washington it's made in tell of it he would have said Jerusalem if he'd said it today it's incredible what we allow that little state to do to our foreign and security policy and to our budget we used to go to the budget drill the state department six billion was about all we got at that time for foreign policy by the time we took the three billion we gave to israel no questions asked and the three billion we gave to egypt no questions asked to keep the peace treaty with israel we had about 400 million yet left for us foreign policy the fifth department was at that time getting about 300 billion whoa when you have a cash balance like that differential you're going to favor the gun over the diplomacy every single time gem mattis said one of the smartest things he ever said was if you're not going to give the state department more dollars buy me more bullets why have we allowed this country that our founding fathers thought was an empire of liberty an empire of freedom whose greatest and most powerful weapon in the world would be our example to turn into what it is today when simon bolivar back up a little bit friday last i was in washington i got a telephone call from a former cia officer for latin america he said larry will you go to new york with me i said what are we going to new york for fool fool he said we're going to new york to meet with a venezuelan foreign minister and the venezuelan ambassador to the united nations what's our purpose we're going to try to give them some way out we went and we met young foreign minister really probably no more than 35 40 years old very articulate very venezuelan very much convinced that he was on the right side not so much because of nicolas moduro but because nicolas moduro was the elected president of venezuela through a constitutional process and if you don't know much about venezuela's history it is not colombia's it is not brazil's it is not argentina's and it's certainly not panamá's or nicaraguas or Honduras's venezuela is the bastion of long live democracy in south america however imperfect and we're anybody to be telling somebody their democracy is imperfect so his pride was palpable and he looked at me and he said we are not panamá you cannot drop the 82nd airborne down on us kill 3 000 of our citizens take our president to miami you cannot do that we will fight you tooth and nail we will go to the mountains we will go to the hills we will fight you forever and he leaned back in his chair and i said mr minister i know you're telling the truth i've trained some of your troops i know they're good troops i know the reason there's no civil war in venezuela right now is because they adhere however imperfectly to their constitutional responsibilities so how can we keep this from happening how can we at the very moment we uttered our final words before he had to go the united states announced that it had declared them persona non grata and in a very diplomatic terminology that that really weeks with arrogance persons not to be in new york city that's what it really amounts to so they had to leave they had to get up and leave right there on the spot they had to pack their goods all their staff had to pack their goods they had to leave new york upon being arrested if they didn't what arrogance what hubris what stupidity and guess what happened yesterday if you didn't follow it apparently the president talked to vladmy putin and putin talked him out of a military operation in venezuela i wanted to stand up on the back of my chair on the airplane and applaud you know so what if he's complicit with putin this is a smart move let the venezuelans decide their own fate and keep el coloso del norte out but this is a this is a very short live victory probably one doesn't know as my students will tell you after doing case study after case study for 13 weeks three hour seminar each week on this administration very mercurial very narcissistic very incredibly wrapped up in domestic politics more than anything else the german foreign minister was right when he said president trump didn't leave the nuclear agreement with iran because of security reasons he left it for his base that's what the german foreign minister said and he was right he made a promise to the base he fulfilled his promise on to the next promise that's what we have in washington now none of this is going to change until you get people like you multiplied a hundred thousand times over and you start taking every form of action that you possibly can i i i looked over at the venezuelan embassy and i saw that miss benjamin was occupying the embassy i called her on the phone and i said what do you need you need somebody else to come over there she said oh i got lots of volunteers we're prepared to stay here forever there's courage there's moral and physical courage i know it's hard we've got jobs we've all got things to do we've got families we've got grandchildren and children and so forth but if we don't take action across this country we are going to be in such deep trouble in a very short time that we might not be able to get ourselves out of it without a cataclysm either an internal domestic cataclysm or an external one or both they tend to sort of historically speaking accompany one another we are talking about a really bad future if we don't shift a few degrees at least and i would like to see it shift markedly the course of this ship of state we are going to have real serious serious problems thank you i don't understand you're not joining the empire party and how can you stand of the party good question it's a good question that i get from sydney to paris why are you still a republican i'm doing an interview for french uh 24 which is their npr and the guy asked me in the prep that very same question because we need two parties and because there are four of us left you can probably name them as best as i and and we want to retake our party out in the hustings as i talked to you about in court of lane in other places like houston i encountered this too there are people 35 to 50 who are of the same mind as i am and it's a long-term haul it's not a quick solution but we want to change the republican party and let me just hasten to add the man who stood in our way on getting the united states out of the war in yemen most powerfully was stenny heuer a democrat so both of them take money from the complex both of them i just wonder what you think we can do about the media and what you would think um well i mean i want to speak about angus king in some way i'm not quite sure i i think we don't support him in our views and um so what can we do to change his mind how can we how can we love these people into understanding that they too have grandchildren and and and what can we do about the media with regard to angus i met him before he ever ran he came down to washington and wanted to talk to a dozen or so people who knew washington a bit and i was included in that and he wanted to see one if he wanted to run two if he thought he could win one dollar advice and three with whom he should caucus if he did win of course we i'm a republican i'm sitting there i said democrats don't caucus with my gang they're nuts um i don't know how you get him off of some of the things he sometimes comes down on he seems to be pretty squared away with regard to domestic issues from time to time but when you get to foreign policy he goes with the committee chairman the you know the arm services committee the foreign relations committee whatever i find that appalling i actually had dad cocker from mississippi look at me and say this is on the emin war before dad had to leave because he got really sick he said i always vote with the committee of responsibility i said that's the foreign affairs committee don't you have a mind senator and i you know shut up larry you'll never get anybody you know um and he just looked at me and one of his staff jumped in quickly you you learned very swiftly that staff are more powerful than the members some in particular but his staff his chief of staff finally said to me well you know he doesn't feel like he has the expertise so okay you don't have the expertise to tell that that's a humanitarian disaster that bums are waging the war they're losing the war and we shouldn't be there come on give me a break but that's the kind of stuff you run into all the time angus sometimes is squared away and sometimes he isn't same with my senator from virginia tim kane uh his son's a marine and yet he'll make some comments sometimes i'll look at him like senator you got to be kidding me or have you got your brain engaged today because he's going to side over there with the national security boys the best thing we could do for the national security of the united states of america is to shut down about three quarters of the 800 bases we have in the world the rest of the world combined including russia and china has 77 bases we have over 800 that's an invitation to war i can tell you right now those guys walking around in nigeria in molly in sudan they're looking for somebody to shoot at them and it's going to happen oh got another war you know another place to fly drones my son's a drone file my son is now violating the borders of 17 different countries with whom we are not constitutionally at war and in seven of them killing people the highest growth rate of post dramatic stress is within his squadron and other squadrons like his because these young men and women do not like killing people from 10 000 miles away and without really any justification now some of them do some of them are typical you know masochists whatever but most of them don't this is what we're doing this is crazy it's insane i just don't believe that we're doing this kind of stuff um if my husband would say so you've touched upon many of the things i've been yacking about for years you know all these different the bases i just was arrested recently in in my letter in the column i mentioned the 800 bases and the fact that we're at war in so many countries where we have no business to be uh i was in uh venezuela a few years ago with a group uh and uh the under scissor chavez at the time and the people were going around with these little constitutions in their pocket they were very proud to carry their constitution in their pockets you know and what we're doing there again is you know i've been to nicaragua and so forth and when will it ever stop not in my lifetime it's you know yeah it's particularly egregious and and here let's share the let's share the burden here hillary clinton was responsible for honduras horrible miscarriage of justice horrible we did it for at and t and other commercial assets who didn't like the democracy the people in honduras who were saying maybe we shouldn't give half our income every year to the freaking gringos you know maybe we should have our own telecommunications industry that's what's happening in venezuela maybe the oil wealth should go to venezuelans and not to charles coke you know you know charles coke has the only facility in texas that refines venezuelan oil don't you and that when hugo chavez turned it off coke went up to canada to the tar sands the most poisonous oil of all to burn and he had to have the pipeline in order to make that productive and when the pipeline didn't come through he went back to texas and agitated for war with venezuela at the same time he's trying to hire me through his coke institute to go out and give an anti-war message now figure that one out this guy is smart he knows how to work every angle all the time and he's so filthy rich he's like mustatheles with gold this question is more of telling you what's happened you talked to medea as of yesterday a whole bunch of venezuelans who are fourth and what's the other fellows the opposition came there okay and and they are not allowing food to be brought in and they are banging on the doors and they are doing all this stuff and the dc police are allowing it and they have arrested people who are bringing food to the people inside so she needs your help now well i'm supposed to go speak tomorrow no monday afternoon i'll probably get arrested um this is not you bring up another part of this though that's that's huge and the dc police force is a component of this in the last ten years the pentagon has sold five point six billion dollars worth of 50 caliber machine guns m16s a wraps armored cars swat gear you name it to civilian law enforcement at widman mary we were the proud recipients of 500 m16a3 weapons thank god our president said what the hell do we need with these weapons send them back to washington so we ship them back to washington but this is contaminated civilian law enforcement so that now you have civilian law enforcement dressed up looking like special operating forces swat teams and masks with knee pads and automatic weapons it's incredible what we've done now we'll say this at the end of the second obama administration he took a serious look at this and he restricted statutorily and by executive order most of it by executive order one law do d from passing out so much of this stuff to civilian law enforcement but it's there and it's contaminated a lot we had 35 police chiefs los angeles chicago houston dallas into the constitution project in washington and we sat them down in a room when we said tell us about what this is doing to a police chief they said it's contaminating our civilian law enforcement we have principles like community first principles like we shoot as a last resort principles like we don't do all these no knocks swats on just a simple telephone call they told us about lawsuits in some of these police forces that told hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money having to go out to pay compensation for making the raid on the wrong house for killing the wrong woman for killing a baby they had to do that kind of stuff this is what we're doing talk about militarizing farm policy we're militarizing the country do you know the history behind putting the military aids in all of the legislator's offices when that started and what we can do against that actually you know who the last person was who took action against that called them all back secretary rumsfeld secretary rumsfeld in 2000 and 2001 called every military officer working externally to the pentagon back to the pentagon or to their duty otherwise from the congress from the state department from everywhere he pulled them all back and then he said i'm going to study whether i should send them back or not pretty astute move really if you think about a civilian secretary trying to establish his rule over a body that had become almost totally uniformed six months later he had sent them back because everybody who had them found them to be efficient effective and almost priceless so the congress got them back the state department got them back everybody in the bureaucracy got their military officers back here's a part of the problem the military gets the job done the military is mission oriented if you tell the military to go do something they will generally go do it if your civilian bureaucracy is falling apart if you can't attract good people into your civilian bureaucracy if you're de-emphasizing that civilian bureaucracy by cutting its funding and so forth as is the case across the cabinet the military becomes the weapon of choice this is part of the problem in washington this is part of the problem why young people for example from my seminars i have to talk hard into going into public service not the peace corps william mary leads the country for universities of its side size putting people in the peace corps when i when i get somebody into the nsa or the cia or as recently happened into the geospatial agency or something like that i feel like i've gotten a small triumph because i know these kids character i know their families i know how talented they are i know how smart they are but i also know that i'm competing with deloitte tush goldman sacks and all the other people who want them to come to wall street and make a million dollars in their first ten years or more i have a young student right now uh ski on a family of of extraordinary extraordinary public service in virginia mayors governors in his lineage and harrison came in to see me right before graduation he said i'm going to work for the goldman sacks and i said harrison you're one of the brightest kids i've ever had in my seminar you need to do public service let's talk about this no no i'm going to work for goldman sacks two million dollars in his first three years talked to him the other day i said harrison you could come back and do some public service he said yeah i'll come back and be a cabinet officer or something like that okay so he's got his sights set real high and he may indeed do that and he may make a great secretary of defense or state or assistant secretary or under or whatever but that's a real challenge these young people they go to wall street they go where they can make tons of money they don't go to the government state local or federal they go to wall street can you blame them with wall street at offering what it offers and we sit back like in 2007 and eight and we say i wonder why the sec got so beaten so badly by wall street or why any government agency got beaten so badly by wall street what you sent princeton harvard cornell columbia to wall street what do you expect you damn sure didn't send them into the armed forces they wouldn't go there please thank you um carnal wilkerson um so um i've got two questions one one is a little bit quicker um so why john bolton when trump has actually wanted to make some some deals so like brokering this piece on the korean peninsula amazes me but why pick john bolton um when he is angling for wars in all these places and the the other question is you mentioned um you know you know there have to be two parties and we might not try to repair the republican party but why not four parties why not five parties and um you know really democrats and republicans have become a single plutocratic party that is keeping all this in place i think you know but why do you think there has to be just two parties let me take your second question first if you have four parties and they're all viable parties you can have a president with 27 percent of the vote that's the usual political scientist argument back you can look at the philippines look at any place that has lots of viable parties my argument back to that is we haven't elected a president with more than 27 percent of the vote in over 60 years so why do you care we have it look at the polls we have most turned out 51 52 percent so that means 26 1 you know so you're i take your point i take your point the question is building up the other parties you know and and it would take a while probably maybe some trauma to do it uh but i'm not a gain it i'm i'm very much for getting rid of the electoral college why should 400 000 Wyoming citizens have two senators and 40 million californians have two senators that's absurd the founding fathers created the electoral college to take the demos out of democracy founding fathers didn't like democracy let's face it they didn't jeffson maybe was an exception but even jeffson if you parse his writings didn't like the mob he didn't he liked the mob until they were outside his door then he didn't like them so and a lot of the founders as john lock and others montesquieu and others were their mentors thought that pure democracy was a recipe for real danger a scott actually said this which rings kind of true if you think about it this thing called democracy if it were pure and you gave the people the vote they'd vote themselves the national treasury there's some truth in that there's some truth in that charles coakley uses that argument all the time that's why he's against democracy because of medicare medicaid social security everyone should work hard die if you're worthless and get your million if you're not that's charles coak's philosophy really that's his economic philosophy bolton is another matter altogether and trump is another matter altogether i i i continued the thing first of all hr made trump really angry hr mcmaster hr mcmaster who was the national security advisor before bolton hr was a bright guy and he tended to argue with trump and he tended to point out the bad aspects of trump's decision-making including his damn tweeting hr hated his tweeting so trump finally gets rid of him and brings in someone who would kiss his ass and that's what bolton has done bolton is smart enough to realize that trump's inattention gives him a lot of room for maneuver and so he kisses up but at the time trump leaves after getting his kiss bolton is maneuvering and he's maneuvering with people like marco rubio and rick scott elliott abrams and a host of others that's not that hard to do in washington i watch yeah i watched better presidents and trump allowed this to happen to them not really not really it's the other way around bolton looks at him as the jester you may have written dexter filkins article that supposedly bolton said trump was a moron that's the beginning of john's departure from the white house soon as trump is that has that call to his attention or reads it himself which would be rare that's the beginning of john's departure from the white house you don't call president trump a moron so watch that closely it can't happen fast enough as far as i'm concerned but then who's going to you know who's going to replace him that's the question learned that i've learned that the the state department has really diminished and uh many employees they are forced to leave and i've also heard that the state to put he's trying to eliminate the state department do you know anything about that my party or the republican party has had a wing in it for a long time jesse helms led it at one time that wants to do away with diplomacy as an instrument of national power they think it's a waste um yes the republican party has had a vendetta against the state department i play some of the nixon tapes for my students and they are they are first of all they don't they don't believe i'm playing a president if you if you haven't ever listened to the nixon tapes i don't mean just david frost version i mean the tapes you need to this is one of the most venal poisonous evil tongued individual you'd ever want to hear in your life now was he a bad president we can debate that but on those tapes you get richard nixon in his most violent form and when he says things like those kikes those jews over there at the bottom and he looks at henry kissinger he says oh i'm not talking about you henry you know henry was jewish too and when he talks about those commie pink olfago jew kikes at the state department that's nixon's view of the state department he didn't go to china to meet with malice tongu and joe and lye with his secretary's state as his principal partner he took rogers with him put him in a doubty cottage at the end of the row and he and henry met with joe and malice secretary state never set foot in the room nixon hated the state republicans do not like diplomacy they do not like the state department they do away with it tomorrow if they couldn't save the money just as they do away with medicare do away with medicare privatized social security and so forth this is the real danger in the republican party and they are working hard to get all three branches of government in that bailiwick watch what they do with roe v wade don't believe them for a minute they've packed the court to get rid of roe v wade don't believe them for a second at the supreme court and the justice in charge of it will suddenly wake up to democracy and constitutionalism and say oh no i vote with this group i vote with this group no no no this is preacher packing the supreme court for the purpose of the republican party and one of those purposes is destroyed diplomacy as an instrument of national power they think it's a waste of time one of the reasons they do is because they're so inept at it they're utterly inept at it you go back and look at people like john quincey adams who was probably the best diplomat america ever had and you see what diplomacy is really all about it was often rumored in the white house truthfully i think that the president of the united states when john quincey adams was at the court of catherine knew more about napoleon's movements in europe than napoleon did that's because he was a diplomat he knew the power of diplomacy in both intelligence gathering and in effecting agreements and cordiality between states and among states we don't know that anymore what we do in washington now is follow our rule or we'll bash you that's the mantra in washington if you don't do what we tell you to do we'll bash you either through economic sanctions which we are using to the extent that the rest of the world is going to abandon the dollar within the next 10 to 20 years if not quicker and we're going to suffer big time when they do that because you know how we're keeping our debt manageable in one sense is because we can deflate it all the time by deflating our own currency which is the world's reserve currency we can reduce our debt boom just push the dollar down trawls the gallows said it was the most vicious weapon we had he was right the rest of the world has figured it out and the rest of the world including russia and china and the lead are going to figure out a way around our financial network and around our system and when we're left out in the co we're going to be sitting there holding our fingers trying to figure out what happened everything you're saying tonight including a little the private conversation we had at the start indicates something about evil in the world you mentioned the word evil in reference to richard cheney and i tend to believe that we are witnessing evil on a on a international on a world scale that we haven't seen before i mean despite world war two the trafficking and winning the drugs five trillion dollars a year now five trillion dollars a year is managed by governments and banks for the mothman and when i say the mafia i mean triads in china jacuzzi in japan i mean organized crime from one end of the world i i'd like to return to the question that was raised by this woman to my right here earlier on though what what is your view of the role of media in the well there's a kind of mesmeric metastasizing of evil due to the media and social social networking and so on on a on a scale that the founding fathers couldn't envision and so we've got you know we've got a paradox with the freedom of the press we'd be dead without freedom of the press i mean morally and and financially and physically i mean people like us so it it's a it's an enormous problem but i i wonder if you have some perspective on it that might shed some light on what can be done about the role of media in the world today and the world conditions that that spread well the spread lies the spread lies again and again and and and uh sometimes they do it unconsciously it seems like there's so many images of donald trump that you can't get away from it even on um liberal media i'll stop and see see where you can go with that question i get on average about a hundred emails a day from trump from the organization and and they're they range from rabid lies to even more rabid lies i mean they are on Pelosi they're on any democrat whose name might trip your tongue they they just come across my computer this is a real problem in terms of the internet and in terms of the accessibility of being able to clamp down on a specific group and feed them feed them feed them feed them whether it's those watching fox or it's an internet site or whatever but i do think at the same time i'm seeing an opposition developing within what i would call the still mostly free internet and if that catches on and captures enough people and gets enough money behind it because that's the ultimate power whether or not you got the money to spread the message ask the coke brothers that um then you could have a counter and that counter could be quite powerful if it used the internet and the internet stays free what i think you're going to see them is you're going to see more governments acting like china and countries like china and they're going to be controlling the internet to keep that from happening so what you've just pointed out is one of the most dangerous things that's happening right now and it just might get more dangerous if that happens because the only counter i see right now is the internet and what's happening on it the other problem that that haunts me every day too is that i think what's happening within the corporate media is designed by the plutocracy uh by plutocracy i mean the wealthy period oligarchs can be wealthy they don't have to be wealthy they can be powerful here powerful the plutocracy the difference between that is that's all wealth and so what's happening with that in that group is the same thing that's happening in microcosm in israel sheldon adelson went in and bought up most of the very powerful newspapers in israel and turned them into organs for bb netanyahu and the ultra orthodox coalition that he put together so powerful that they even kept netanyahu from drafting the orthodox remember he he got a law through the kinesit that said hey all you guys out there in gals who are orthodox and getting out of military service about 118 000 over you're going to have to serve well the ultra orthodox and the orthodox got up on their hind legs and said you're not going to do this sheldon adelson got behind them the newspapers they even worked against netanyahu so you see who the power is there it's not necessarily the prime minister it's adelson behind it that's the same thing with our media whether it's the fox network roger ailes rupert murdoch and that crew or whether it's the coke brothers and the ones they own or whether it's some other corporate interest that's what's designed to run our media now and it's designed to have the corporate message and the corporate message is to keep you dumb happy and stupid so that they can do their crimes in the background it's like you said watch what happens to julia nissan watch what happens to him if he is treated the way i think our government is going to treat him then we got a real serious problem julia nissan doesn't matter what you think of him it's what he represents so you said at the beginning that the only way for us forward is to wake the american people up and without the kind of media that we'd prefer we have you and we have um martha and we have uh you know cable access tv um we have to get the people to the street have you got any suggestions yeah you know i came up i came up at a time when the president of the united states couldn't even get out of the white house he couldn't leave the white house the secret service was infuriated you'll notice what they've done now if you've been in washington lately they pushed that perimeter out well beyond where it was at that time i'm talking about the war protest the vietnam war my war they captured that president they captured lbj before they captured nixon then they captured nixon you couldn't get anywhere near to doing that today because they learned government learns too and they pushed that perimeter out so far now you get shot if you get up anywhere around there but what we need is the kind of uprising amongst the american people that occurred in the sixties you know how that got started the draft you betcha don't talk to me about pure motivation and all that crap it was the draft that's why we don't have a draft today so that's why i'm working with a group called the all volunteer force forum on campuses all across america and in the congress and we've made a little bit of progress we're going to make a little more to bring back conscription here's the kicker right now there's a national commission appointed by the president of the united states the current president on military public and national service it's one year into its two year it it just turned out it's interim report here's the three things they were charged to study you want something to really get angry about one should selective service be maintained and if so by whom two should women be subject to the draft three should we have a draft they're going to decide i think to be very politically astute as was the commission that set up the all volunteer force for dick nixon why did they set it up they set it up because nixon didn't like the fact that draft had put so much pressure on it so he got rid of the draft here's what i think they're going to decide they're going to decide that women oh yes women must be subject to the draft and then they're going to disestablish selective service so you know they'll win both ways they'll have no one hollering at them from the women's rights camp women will be subject to the draft but there'll be no system to draft them and then they're going to say okay everything's copacetic our third thing is to say that everybody ought to volunteer for service period and the commission will be over and we'll settle the issue we will not have settled the issue americans will have no skin in the game two ways to get americans to stop the wars now a war tax this levied on every household in the country without exception and a draft two ways to get that to come about american people putting pressure on their congress i watched it happen in 2012 i watched john carrey and barack obama get ready to go to war in syria all of a sudden the american people lit up the senate the house in the white house with emails with phone calls with constituent visits over 200 000 americans in 48 hours came to the two houses of congress hasn't happened in the 20th century as far as i know barack obama john carrey they all backed off war with syria that's the power of the american people but it has to be pointed powerful quick and dirty i mean it has to do it has to work if you can't get the draft and you can't get skin in the game and you can't get taxes that's the only way to do it i watched the same thing with the friends committee for national legislation with the jcpoa the nuclear agreement with iran when we did get it through by the skin of its teeth before trump came in they put americans from fcnl's group into every single senator's office every single representative's office for a day refuse to go home until they've been seen by the member and they talked to them off a sheet of paper that made them smart about the jcpoa and we barely got it through the congress that's real power but it's hard to get together it's hard to coordinate it's hard to make work you've got to have a really powerful issue and some really dedicated people but it can't be done thanks thank you very much criminal workers and for being here