WEBVTT NOTE The Song that Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.900 Margaret Atwood's poem, Siren Song, begins, 2 00:00:07.900 --> 00:00:12.560 this is the one song everyone would like to learn, 3 00:00:12.560 --> 00:00:15.440 the song that is irresistible, 4 00:00:15.440 --> 00:00:20.260 the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons 5 00:00:20.260 --> 00:00:27.800 even though they see the beached skulls. 6 00:00:27.800 --> 00:00:33.760 Our rulers know how to sing that song, and they sing it day and night. 7 00:00:33.760 --> 00:00:42.000 The beach skulls are those of our fathers and our sons, our friends, neighbors, for 8 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:47.520 whom the song proved not only irresistible, but fatal. 9 00:00:47.520 --> 00:00:55.960 The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised, a fire that 10 00:00:55.960 --> 00:01:03.800 that at best can be controlled for only a short time before it or leaps its improvised 11 00:01:03.800 --> 00:01:09.480 containments and spreads its flames far and wide. 12 00:01:09.480 --> 00:01:14.680 Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in 13 00:01:14.680 --> 00:01:22.720 civil society to fend off the state's depredations and therefore augments the public's multifaceted 14 00:01:22.720 --> 00:01:28.720 victimization at the hands of state functionaries. 15 00:01:28.720 --> 00:01:37.400 Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency, war and other 16 00:01:37.400 --> 00:01:45.800 crises comparable to war in the seriousness of the threats they pose. 17 00:01:45.800 --> 00:01:53.580 States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war, not always against foreign foes, of 18 00:01:53.580 --> 00:01:59.440 course, but always against their own subjects. 19 00:01:59.440 --> 00:02:06.000 The state's most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, 20 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:08.520 is robbery. 21 00:02:08.520 --> 00:02:14.540 The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving 22 00:02:14.540 --> 00:02:23.500 in a different name, taxation, and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible 23 00:02:23.500 --> 00:02:33.420 and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine 24 00:02:33.420 --> 00:02:38.580 combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral 25 00:02:38.580 --> 00:03:08.580 They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty and property, only the government can provide these services. 26 00:03:08.580 --> 00:03:16.420 provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting 27 00:03:16.420 --> 00:03:24.560 to competing suppliers of law, order and security, however, because the government enforces a 28 00:03:24.560 --> 00:03:31.480 monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged services and brings violence 29 00:03:31.480 --> 00:03:50.480 In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket. 30 00:03:50.480 --> 00:03:55.480 All governments are, as they must be, oligarchies. 31 00:03:55.480 --> 00:04:06.480 Only a relatively small number of people have substantial effective discretion to make critical decisions about how the state's power will be brought to bear. 32 00:04:06.480 --> 00:04:20.480 Beyond the oligarchy itself and the police and military forces that compose its Praetorian Guard, somewhat larger groups constitute a supporting coalition. 33 00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:48.040 These groups provide important financial and other support to the oligarchs and look to them for compensating rewards, legal privileges, subsidies, jobs, exclusive franchises and licenses, transfers of financial income and wealth, goods and services in kind, and other booty, channeled to them at the expense of the mass of the people. 34 00:04:48.040 --> 00:04:57.960 Thus, the political class in general, that is, the oligarchs, the praetorian guards and the supporting coalition, 35 00:04:57.960 --> 00:05:05.120 uses government power, which ultimately means the police and the armed forces, 36 00:05:05.120 --> 00:05:13.120 to exploit everyone outside this class by wielding or threatening to wield violence against all who fail to pay the tribute 37 00:05:13.120 --> 00:05:18.120 the oligarch's demand, or to obey the rules they dictate. 38 00:05:20.120 --> 00:05:27.120 Democratic political forms and rituals, such as elections and formal administrative proceedings, 39 00:05:28.120 --> 00:05:34.120 disguise this class exploitation and trick the masses into the false belief 40 00:05:35.120 --> 00:05:39.120 that the government's operation yields them net benefits. 41 00:05:39.120 --> 00:05:50.120 In the most extreme form of misapprehension, the people at large become convinced that owing to democracy, they themselves are the government. 42 00:05:50.120 --> 00:06:06.120 Individual passages back and forth across the boundary between the political class and the exploited class testify, however, to nothing more than the system's cunningly contrived flexibility and openness. 43 00:06:06.120 --> 00:06:26.120 Although the system is inherently exploitative and cannot exist in any other form, it allows some leeway at the margins in the determination of which specific individuals will be the shafters and which the shaftees. 44 00:06:26.120 --> 00:06:38.120 At the top, a modest degree of circulation of elites within the oligarchy also serves to mask the political system's essential character. 45 00:06:38.120 --> 00:06:48.120 It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats 46 00:06:48.120 --> 00:06:58.120 The threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all. 47 00:06:58.120 --> 00:07:07.120 The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm Syndrome writ large. 48 00:07:07.120 --> 00:07:17.120 Yet, no matter how widely this syndrome may extend, it cannot alter the basic fact that owing to the operation of government as we know it, 49 00:07:17.120 --> 00:07:34.120 That is, government without genuine, express, individual consent, a minority lives on balance at the expense of the rest, and the rest therefore lose on balance in the process. 50 00:07:34.120 --> 00:07:45.120 While the oligarchs, elected or not, it scarcely matters, preside over the enormous web of criminal organizations we know as the state. 51 00:07:45.120 --> 00:08:15.120 Notwithstanding the ideological enchantment with which high priests and status intellectuals have beguiled the plundered class, many members of this class retain a capacity to recognize at least some of their losses and hence they sometimes resist further incursions on their rights by publicly expressing their grievances, by supporting political challengers 52 00:08:15.120 --> 00:08:34.120 by leaders who promise to lighten their burdens, by fleeing the country, and most important, by evading or avoiding taxes and by violating legal prohibitions and regulatory constraints on their actions, as in the so-called underground economy or black market. 53 00:08:34.120 --> 00:08:44.120 These various forms of resistance, together, compose a force that opposes the government's constant pressure to expand its domination. 54 00:08:44.120 --> 00:08:55.120 These two forces, working one against the other, establish a locus of equilibrium, 55 00:08:55.120 --> 00:09:00.120 a boundary between the set of rights the government has overridden or seized 56 00:09:00.120 --> 00:09:04.920 and the set of rights the plundered class has somehow managed to retain, 57 00:09:04.920 --> 00:09:10.320 whether by formal constitutional constraints or by everyday tax evasion, 58 00:09:10.320 --> 00:09:17.640 black market transactions and other defensive violations of the government's oppressive rules. 59 00:09:17.640 --> 00:09:25.480 Politics in the largest sense can be viewed as the struggle to push this boundary one way or the other. 60 00:09:25.480 --> 00:09:33.240 For members of the political class, the crucial question is always, how can we push out the frontier? 61 00:09:33.240 --> 00:09:39.760 How can we augment the government's dominion and plunder with net gain to ourselves, 62 00:09:39.760 --> 00:09:48.280 the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do? 63 00:09:48.280 --> 00:09:56.280 National emergency, war or a similarly menacing crisis answers the political class's crucial 64 00:09:56.280 --> 00:10:02.640 question more effectively than anything else. Because such a crisis has a uniquely effective 65 00:10:02.640 --> 00:10:09.000 capacity to dissipate the forces that otherwise would obstruct or oppose the government's 66 00:10:09.000 --> 00:10:17.440 expansion. Virtually any war will serve, at least for a while, because in modern nation 67 00:10:17.440 --> 00:10:24.080 In some states, the outbreak of war invariably leads the masses to rally around the flag, 68 00:10:24.080 --> 00:10:30.480 regardless of their previous ideological stance in relation to the government. 69 00:10:30.480 --> 00:10:36.520 Recall the situation in 1941, for example, when public opinion polls and other evidence 70 00:10:36.520 --> 00:10:43.520 indicated that a great majority of the American people, approximately 80 percent of them as 71 00:10:43.520 --> 00:10:59.520 as late as the autumn, opposed outright engagement in the World War, an engagement that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration had been seeking relentlessly by Hook and by Crook from the very beginning. 72 00:10:59.520 --> 00:11:10.520 When the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached the public, mass opposition to war dissolved overnight, almost completely. 73 00:11:10.520 --> 00:11:17.520 No wonder the neocon intriguers in a September 2000 report of the Project for the New American 74 00:11:17.520 --> 00:11:25.160 Century expressed their yearning for, quote, some catastrophic and catalyzing event like 75 00:11:25.160 --> 00:11:30.400 a new Pearl Harbor, end quote. 76 00:11:30.400 --> 00:11:36.960 Although other kinds of great crises may not elicit the same immediate submission to the 77 00:11:36.960 --> 00:11:42.240 The government's announced program for the people's salvation. They may prove equally 78 00:11:42.240 --> 00:11:49.000 effective if they are sufficiently menacing and persistent. Thus, the Great Depression, 79 00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:56.520 which pushed millions of Americans into economic desperation in the early 1930s, was eventually 80 00:11:56.520 --> 00:12:03.800 viewed by almost everybody as, in Justice Brandeis' words, an emergency more serious 81 00:12:03.800 --> 00:12:12.840 than War. Other pregnant crises have included nationwide strikes or widespread labor disturbances, 82 00:12:12.840 --> 00:12:20.040 so-called energy crises such as those of the 1970s, perceived crime waves, great epidemics 83 00:12:20.040 --> 00:12:28.040 or health scares, and lately even a bogus scare about global warming. The news on that 84 00:12:28.040 --> 00:12:36.120 That front has not been good in the last 24 hours, and unfortunately I think it's going 85 00:12:36.120 --> 00:12:40.800 to get much worse in the future. 86 00:12:40.800 --> 00:12:49.960 In 2001, the attacks of 9-11 answered to perfection the neocon prayer for a new Pearl Harbor. 87 00:12:49.960 --> 00:12:54.800 An administration that had been wallowing without a breeze in its sails was suddenly 88 00:12:54.800 --> 00:13:01.800 In the Gallup poll taken during September 7 to 10, 2001, 51% of the respondents approved of the way George W. Bush was handling his job as president, 39% disapproved, and 10% had no opinion, yielding what I call an opinion vote. 89 00:13:24.800 --> 00:13:41.200 A few days later, while the ruins of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers were still smoldering, 90 00:13:41.200 --> 00:13:52.640 86% approved, 10% disapproved, and only 4% had no opinion, an opinion balance of 76%, 91 00:13:52.640 --> 00:13:59.640 or more than six times greater than it had been just a few days earlier. 92 00:13:59.760 --> 00:14:06.540 Although Bush had done absolutely nothing to demonstrate an abruptly improved performance 93 00:14:06.540 --> 00:14:11.840 of his job as president, nearly the entire population, many members of which roundly 94 00:14:11.840 --> 00:14:18.840 disliked the president, suddenly showered approbation on his performance in office. 95 00:14:18.840 --> 00:14:24.820 A week later, the opinion balance had risen even higher to 84 percent on the strength 96 00:14:24.820 --> 00:14:29.860 of a 90 percent approval response. 97 00:14:29.860 --> 00:14:39.120 Afterward, Bush's job approval rating followed a long downward trend, interrupted by only 98 00:14:39.120 --> 00:14:43.860 brief upticks until it reached its present range. 99 00:14:43.860 --> 00:14:52.760 In the Gallup poll of early July this year, the opinion balance was negative 37 percent, 100 00:14:52.760 --> 00:14:58.800 and only 29 percent of the respondents rated the President's performance favorably. 101 00:14:58.800 --> 00:15:04.020 In more recent polls, the balances stood a few points higher in the President's favor, 102 00:15:04.020 --> 00:15:09.740 but such small differences have little significance. 103 00:15:09.740 --> 00:15:14.500 Following the long downhill slide, Bush's performance approval rating held up amazingly 104 00:15:14.500 --> 00:15:22.780 well among Republicans, but fell lower and lower among both Democrats and Independents, 105 00:15:22.780 --> 00:15:29.940 an expression of how normal political partisanship reasserted itself as the initial unifying 106 00:15:29.940 --> 00:15:36.400 crisis slipped farther and farther into the background. 107 00:15:36.400 --> 00:15:40.620 Other movements may be seen in the Gallup polls that ask respondents whether they view 108 00:15:40.620 --> 00:15:48.900 George W. Bush himself favorably or unfavorably, not the job he was doing but the man. Here 109 00:15:48.900 --> 00:15:59.600 the opinion balance jumped from 25% in August 2001 to 76% in November 2001, a three-fold 110 00:15:59.600 --> 00:16:16.240 When the public's approval of the President's actions is broken down by specific issues, 111 00:16:16.240 --> 00:16:24.680 we see that his greatest 9-11 related jump occurred in the area of, mirabile dictu, foreign 112 00:16:24.680 --> 00:16:27.320 affairs. 113 00:16:27.320 --> 00:16:33.880 In the Gallup poll taken during July 2001, the opinion balance in this area was positive 114 00:16:33.880 --> 00:16:42.880 21 percent, but in the poll taken during October 2001, the opinion balanced a jump to 67 percent, 115 00:16:42.880 --> 00:16:46.120 more than three times higher. 116 00:16:46.120 --> 00:16:48.720 The lesson is clear. 117 00:16:48.720 --> 00:16:56.340 If the president conducts foreign policy so as to antagonize foreigners and provoke them 118 00:16:56.340 --> 00:17:02.660 to launch massively destructive attacks on this country, the American public will respond 119 00:17:02.660 --> 00:17:08.980 with an enormous outpouring of approval of his actions, as if to prove that in our political 120 00:17:08.980 --> 00:17:15.140 system no failure goes unrewarded. 121 00:17:15.140 --> 00:17:20.180 Bertrand Russell long ago stated the underlying condition for this sort of perverse public 122 00:17:20.180 --> 00:17:28.500 reaction when he remarked that, quote, neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted 123 00:17:28.500 --> 00:17:35.980 to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. 124 00:17:35.980 --> 00:17:43.040 Indeed, the fundamental condition of the entire process by which the government leads people 125 00:17:43.040 --> 00:18:06.040 is widespread public fear, which causes people to put aside their normal distrust of the state and to turn to it, especially to its chief as a child turns to a parent for security and reassurance that everything will be okay if only people do as they are told. 126 00:18:06.040 --> 00:18:33.040 Not only did the events of September 11, 2001 cause the American public to look more favorably on the president as a person, as a president, and as the principal architect of U.S. foreign policy, but those events also apparently caused the public to express more trust in the federal government in general in its handling of both international and domestic matters. 127 00:18:33.040 --> 00:19:00.040 In the Gallup Poll of September 7-10, 2001, 68% of the respondents expressed a great deal or a fair amount of trust and confidence in the government's handling of international problems, whereas 31% expressed not very much or none at all, implying an opinion balance of 37%. 128 00:19:00.040 --> 00:19:10.040 A month later in the poll conducted in mid-October, this opinion balance had risen to 67%, almost doubling. 129 00:19:10.040 --> 00:19:20.040 The public's perversely increased trust in the government had also spilled inexplicably onto its handling of domestic problems, 130 00:19:20.040 --> 00:19:29.040 Increasing this opinion balance from 22% in the early September poll to 56% in the October poll. 131 00:19:29.040 --> 00:19:36.040 I know this is tedious, but there's a story in all of these poll results. 132 00:19:36.040 --> 00:19:41.040 It's too loudly spoken to be denied. 133 00:19:41.040 --> 00:19:47.040 A final measure of public opinion, trust in Washington to do what is right, 134 00:19:47.040 --> 00:19:57.760 Right, as the Gallup poll puts it ludicrously, which is normally a fairly stable indicator, 135 00:19:57.760 --> 00:20:08.080 also rose in an unusual way owing to 9-11. In the Gallup poll of July 6-9, 2000, 42 percent 136 00:20:08.080 --> 00:20:12.920 of the respondents expressed confidence that the government will do what is right just 137 00:20:12.920 --> 00:20:21.360 Just about always or most of the time, whereas 58 percent responded only some of the time 138 00:20:21.360 --> 00:20:28.400 or never, which implies an opinion balance of negative 16 percent. 139 00:20:28.400 --> 00:20:34.940 When the pollsters next asked this question in October 2001, however, the opinion balance 140 00:20:34.940 --> 00:20:42.120 had risen to positive 21 percent, indicating a complete turnaround toward greater trust 141 00:20:42.120 --> 00:20:47.840 than distrust in the government. 142 00:20:47.840 --> 00:20:53.180 At the time of these events, as I considered everything that was going on, I was dismayed 143 00:20:53.180 --> 00:20:59.360 by what seemed to me to be a wholly unwarranted public stampede into the protective arms of 144 00:20:59.360 --> 00:21:04.560 the federal government, the same government that had been robbing and abusing most of 145 00:21:04.560 --> 00:21:11.940 the people in countless ways for as long as they could remember. Hardly anyone asked whether 146 00:21:11.940 --> 00:21:18.140 Whether the government's actions abroad might actually have provoked the 9-11 attacks. 147 00:21:18.140 --> 00:21:24.400 Of course most were so ignorant of those actions that they had no inkling of how the government 148 00:21:24.400 --> 00:21:27.520 might have created such a provocation. 149 00:21:27.520 --> 00:21:35.300 Many people seemed consumed by a combination of fear and rage that manifested itself in 150 00:21:35.300 --> 00:21:43.220 and a desire to nuke someone, anyone who might have had something to do with the attacks. 151 00:21:43.220 --> 00:21:48.380 Standards of proof fell precipitously. People didn't want investigation. They didn't want 152 00:21:48.380 --> 00:21:54.440 to get to the bottom of what had happened. Instead, they wanted action, and in particular, 153 00:21:54.440 --> 00:22:03.440 they wanted the government to strike back immediately at any and all plausible targets. 154 00:22:03.440 --> 00:22:14.440 As searching for the cause of this tremendous, rationally unjustified rallying around the flag, we do not have far to go. 155 00:22:14.440 --> 00:22:24.440 Such public reactions are always driven by a combination of fear, ignorance and uncertainty, 156 00:22:24.440 --> 00:22:41.440 against a background of intense jingoistic nationalism, a popular culture predisposed toward violence, and a general inability to distinguish between the state and the people at large. 157 00:22:41.440 --> 00:22:52.440 Because the government ceaselessly sings the siren song, relentlessly propagandizing the public to look upon it as their protector, 158 00:22:52.440 --> 00:23:00.440 Such alleged protection being the principal excuse for its routinely robbing them and violating their natural rights. 159 00:23:00.440 --> 00:23:07.440 And because the mass media incessantly magnify and spread the government's propaganda, 160 00:23:07.440 --> 00:23:15.440 we can scarcely be surprised if that propaganda turns out to have entered deeply into many people's thinking, 161 00:23:15.440 --> 00:23:19.440 especially when they are in a state of near panic, 162 00:23:19.440 --> 00:23:33.440 Unable to think clearly in an informed way, most people fall back on a child-like, us-against-them style of understanding the perceived threat and what should be done about it. 163 00:23:33.440 --> 00:23:42.440 If any resistance should arise to the ruler's war-making, the state has a time-tested means of disposing of the resistors. 164 00:23:42.440 --> 00:23:54.440 Perhaps the classic description of this tactic was given by the Nazi bigwig, Hermann Göring, when he was being held in prison during the trials at Nuremberg in 1946. 165 00:23:54.440 --> 00:24:09.440 This account comes to us from Gustav Gilbert, a German-speaking prison psychologist who had free access to all the prisoners during the trials and talked to them frequently in private. 166 00:24:09.440 --> 00:24:17.440 If you haven't read Gustav Gilbert's book, I highly recommend it, by the way. 167 00:24:17.440 --> 00:24:29.440 It's fascinating with all the accounts of what the men on trial were saying privately among themselves as well as publicly during the trial. 168 00:24:29.440 --> 00:24:38.440 On the evening of April 18, 1946, Gilbert visited Göring in his cell, and he later described their conversation as follows. 169 00:24:38.440 --> 00:24:51.440 We got around to the subject of war again, and I said that contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people were very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction. 170 00:24:51.440 --> 00:25:06.440 Why, of course, the people don't want war, Gorin shrugged. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? 171 00:25:06.440 --> 00:25:15.440 Naturally, the common people don't want war, neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. 172 00:25:15.440 --> 00:25:25.440 But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple means to drag the people along, 173 00:25:25.440 --> 00:25:32.440 whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. 174 00:25:32.440 --> 00:25:46.440 There is one difference I pointed out. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war. 175 00:25:46.440 --> 00:25:57.440 Oh, that is all well and good, Goring replied, but the voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. 176 00:25:57.440 --> 00:26:08.440 That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. 177 00:26:08.440 --> 00:26:13.440 It works the same way in any country. 178 00:26:13.440 --> 00:26:20.440 Göring was right, and matters have only become worse in this regard during the past 60 years. 179 00:26:20.440 --> 00:26:27.440 Of course, now you only have to tell the people that someone may attack them five or ten years in the future. 180 00:26:27.440 --> 00:26:33.440 It's not telling them that they are under attack. That's wholly unnecessary. 181 00:26:33.440 --> 00:26:39.440 Under the post-war regime in the United States, of course, Congress never declares war. 182 00:26:39.440 --> 00:26:49.440 It has made no such declaration since June the 5th, 1942, when it declared war on Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. 183 00:26:49.440 --> 00:26:56.440 And the President now wages war solely at his own pleasure and caprice, as if he were Caesar. 184 00:26:56.440 --> 00:27:06.440 I don't believe that's an exaggeration, by the way. Presidents wage war wholly at their own discretion in our system. 185 00:27:06.440 --> 00:27:14.440 If they notify Congress before or after the fact, it is only a courtesy. 186 00:27:14.440 --> 00:27:21.680 Dragging the people along, as Goring put it, remains as easy as ever, because as we've 187 00:27:21.680 --> 00:27:28.640 seen an initial incident, even when the government itself has provoked or trumped up, invariably 188 00:27:28.640 --> 00:27:33.160 causes the masses to rally round the flag. 189 00:27:33.160 --> 00:27:38.040 We've also seen, however, that the ardent enthusiasm and mindless support for the government's 190 00:27:38.040 --> 00:27:43.520 war making begins to erode soon afterward. 191 00:27:43.520 --> 00:27:49.600 When the people increasingly come to their senses, as casualties and other costs accumulate 192 00:27:49.600 --> 00:27:56.320 and as bits and pieces of the truth seep out, why does the system not revert to the status 193 00:27:56.320 --> 00:28:00.000 quo antebellum? 194 00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:05.720 The answer is that actions taken during the early days of the crisis, when the government 195 00:28:05.720 --> 00:28:11.520 responds practically without opposition to the public's fear and desire for retribution 196 00:28:11.520 --> 00:28:20.280 by vastly expending its powers, that's what I call stage two of the ratchet phenomenon. 197 00:28:20.280 --> 00:28:27.040 Take the form of political, legal and institutional changes that set precedents or become so deeply 198 00:28:27.040 --> 00:28:33.440 embedded that not all of them are abandoned during the post-crisis stage of incomplete 199 00:28:33.440 --> 00:28:39.680 retrenchment, which I call stage four of the ratchet phenomenon. 200 00:28:39.680 --> 00:28:45.440 For example, soon after the Pearl Harbor attack, the government enacted the first War Powers 201 00:28:45.440 --> 00:28:54.560 Act on December 18, and the second War Powers Act on March 27, 1942. These sweeping delegations 202 00:28:54.560 --> 00:29:01.640 empowered the president to rearrange the executive branch as he pleased, gave him a free hand 203 00:29:01.640 --> 00:29:07.440 to contract with munitions suppliers almost as he pleased, and gave him far-reaching control 204 00:29:07.440 --> 00:29:13.640 over international financial transactions and censorship power over all communications 205 00:29:13.640 --> 00:29:19.060 between the United States and any foreign country. 206 00:29:19.060 --> 00:29:24.420 They expanded the government's powers to seize private property for war purposes, empowered 207 00:29:24.420 --> 00:29:29.540 the president to set priorities for deliveries of designated goods and services, and gave 208 00:29:29.540 --> 00:29:36.380 the president effectively unrestrained power over resource allocation in the domestic economy, 209 00:29:36.380 --> 00:29:43.140 a power he delegated to the War Production Board under his direct oversight. 210 00:29:43.140 --> 00:29:47.820 Wielding all this authority, the president and his lieutenants became, in effect, central 211 00:29:47.820 --> 00:29:53.620 planners of a command economy for the duration of the war. 212 00:29:53.620 --> 00:30:02.620 Similarly, just six weeks after the 9-11 attacks, the government enacted the USA Patriot Act, 213 00:30:02.620 --> 00:30:10.460 which, as Judge Napolitano described earlier, greatly trenched on civil liberties and long-established 214 00:30:10.460 --> 00:30:16.280 rights, effectively demolished the Fourth Amendment and gave a mighty boost to the U.S. 215 00:30:16.280 --> 00:30:17.820 police state. 216 00:30:17.820 --> 00:30:23.540 Other measures moving in the same direction followed soon afterward, including the nationalization 217 00:30:23.540 --> 00:30:29.660 of the airline security industry and creation of the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the 218 00:30:29.660 --> 00:30:38.020 The Department of Homeland Security, an organization as menacing in its ideological underpinnings 219 00:30:38.020 --> 00:30:45.580 as it is feckless and absurd in its day-to-day operations. 220 00:30:45.580 --> 00:30:50.940 Once the government has expanded greatly at the outset of a war or other crisis and then 221 00:30:50.940 --> 00:30:57.460 employed its new powers for an extended period, getting rid of all the new weapons in the 222 00:30:57.460 --> 00:31:03.460 Government's arsenal of power is virtually impossible, even when the emergency ends and 223 00:31:03.460 --> 00:31:10.240 people clamor for a return to normal arrangements. Of course, as Vice President Cheney told us 224 00:31:10.240 --> 00:31:19.240 immediately after 9-11, the present emergency will never end. In his vision, it is perpetual. 225 00:31:19.240 --> 00:31:24.800 Therefore, many of the crisis measures become permanent parts of the government's apparatus 226 00:31:24.800 --> 00:31:30.960 for Dominating and Robbing Those Outside the Political Class. 227 00:31:30.960 --> 00:31:37.400 Wartime organizations may be retained to carry out new functions. As, for example, the War 228 00:31:37.400 --> 00:31:44.560 Finance Corporation of World War I was kept going for six years after the war, providing 229 00:31:44.560 --> 00:31:52.080 subsidized credit to exporters, agricultural co-ops and rural banks. After finally having 230 00:31:52.080 --> 00:32:03.000 Having been discontinued in 1925, it was revived under a new name, Reconstruction Finance Corporation. 231 00:32:03.000 --> 00:32:09.960 In 1932, a huge lender to politically favored railroads, banks and insurance companies during 232 00:32:09.960 --> 00:32:15.760 the Depression and later the government's chief agency for financing a variety of military 233 00:32:15.760 --> 00:32:20.960 industrial undertakings during World War II. 234 00:32:20.960 --> 00:32:50.960 Retained after 1945, the RFC continued to make subsidized loans to privileged borrowers until it sank in a storm of scandal in 1953, only to be replaced as a political quid pro quo by a similarly egregious agency, the Small Business Administration, which has continued its politically driven misallocation of taxpayer money ever since. 235 00:32:50.960 --> 00:33:20.960 Since. Cases such as that of the Wharf Finance Corporation and its direct descendants exemplify how national emergency solidifies so-called iron triangles, alliances of government bureaucrats, congressional overseers and privileged private sector beneficiaries. These arrangements are called iron because they are so difficult to break. Their beneficiaries have great incentive to 236 00:33:20.960 --> 00:33:44.960 fight for the retention and even for the expansion of the Triangle's activities, whereas the general public rarely has much incentive to fight against them, even when it is aware of them, because the public burden per capita is normally too small to justify anyone's expenditure of much time or effort in the requisite politicking. 237 00:33:44.960 --> 00:33:57.960 Under modern conditions, high wartime taxes always stick to some extent, leaving the amount of the government's plunder much greater after the war than it was before the war. 238 00:33:58.960 --> 00:34:13.960 In the present so-called war on terror, the government has partially concealed this increased seizure of private property by running up the national debt, rather than by jacking up ordinary tax rates or imposing new kinds of taxes. 239 00:34:13.960 --> 00:34:43.960 But this financial trick does not alter the raw fact that the government has been using more of the people's resources for its own purposes, as shown by the rapid run-up of its spending, leaving the public on the hook to pay the increased interest and eventually to repay the principal or to suffer the consequences if the government should attempt in effect to repudiate its obligations to creditors by inflating the money stock. 240 00:34:43.960 --> 00:35:10.960 During the present Bush administration, treasury debt held by the public has grown from $3.3 trillion at the end of fiscal 2001 to $5.1 trillion at the end of fiscal 2007, which just occurred, or by about 53% in only six years. 241 00:35:10.960 --> 00:35:40.960 During the Great Depression, governments at every level greatly increased their tax revenues by imposing new kinds of taxes. State and local sales taxes, for example, or undistributed profits tax at the federal level. In fiscal year 1940, with the Depression still lingering, the government collected 57% more total revenue than it had in the prosperous year 1920. 242 00:35:40.960 --> 00:35:47.960 in 1927. Let me repeat that. In 1940, the Federal Government collected 57% more revenue 243 00:35:51.640 --> 00:35:58.640 than it had in 1927. And people wonder why the Depression lasted so long. And that wasn't 244 00:35:58.940 --> 00:36:05.940 even the half of it. Federal taxes relative to GNP doubled between 1933 and 1940. Apart 245 00:36:05.940 --> 00:36:13.420 and 1940. Apart from the financial legacies that exacerbate the government's burden on 246 00:36:13.420 --> 00:36:20.820 the public, national emergencies leave institutional legacies of various kinds that enhance government 247 00:36:20.820 --> 00:36:27.940 power at the expense of the people's liberties. Rent controls of World War II, for example, 248 00:36:27.940 --> 00:36:34.940 never ended here in New York City for more than 60 years. They have denied landlords 249 00:36:34.940 --> 00:36:39.820 holds in tenants the liberty to contract on any mutually agreeable terms, and they have 250 00:36:39.820 --> 00:36:45.440 created incentives that foster the avoidance of maintenance for rented apartments and discourage 251 00:36:45.440 --> 00:36:51.120 the construction of new structures that would be built if only the housing market were free 252 00:36:51.120 --> 00:36:55.400 of these war-born fetters. 253 00:36:55.400 --> 00:37:00.600 The institutional legacies of the New Deal, of course, are legion, even now, nearly seventy 254 00:37:00.600 --> 00:37:30.600 30 years after FDR's political momentum petered out. A vast system of agribusiness subsidies, intricate regulations of financial markets, union management relations and financial intermediaries, federal insurance of bank deposits, home mortgages and other financial liabilities, direct federal involvement in electricity production and distribution, the list goes on and on. 255 00:37:30.600 --> 00:37:44.600 More important, crisis has effects on the dominant ideology that work in favor of long-lasting government power and the permanent reduction of public liberties. 256 00:37:44.600 --> 00:37:58.600 During wartime and other crises, governments take many actions that would be more or less unthinkable in a reasonably free society during normal times because people would not tolerate them. 257 00:37:58.600 --> 00:38:09.600 Having tolerated them during a national emergency, however, people may come to regard them not only as permanently tolerable, but even as desirable. 258 00:38:09.600 --> 00:38:20.600 For example, nearly everything the U.S. government did during the Great Depression had an obvious wartime precedent in the Great War. 259 00:38:20.600 --> 00:38:23.600 President Herbert Hoover declared, quote, 260 00:38:23.600 --> 00:38:26.600 we use such emergency powers to win the war, 261 00:38:26.600 --> 00:38:29.600 we can use them to fight the depression. 262 00:38:31.600 --> 00:38:35.600 Everything from the depression era agricultural price controls 263 00:38:35.600 --> 00:38:38.600 to the industrial cartelization program, 264 00:38:38.600 --> 00:38:40.600 the public housing program, 265 00:38:40.600 --> 00:38:43.600 the schemes to control oil and coal prices, 266 00:38:43.600 --> 00:38:46.600 the tax hikes, the promotion of labor unionization, 267 00:38:46.600 --> 00:39:16.600 Organization, all had precedent during 1917-18. Obviously, many of these war-inspired public policies then became permanent after the 1930s, as did, later, the military industrial complex created from 1940 to 1945. People can get used to almost anything, especially if it has a plausible justification. 268 00:39:16.600 --> 00:39:34.600 War and other great crises managed by government soften up formerly free people and habituate them to government controls and abuses that they would resist, except for their alleged emergency necessity. 269 00:39:34.600 --> 00:39:50.600 In this way, government emergency measures change the very character of once free people by breaking down their will to be free and their determination to resist homegrown tyranny. 270 00:39:50.600 --> 00:40:05.600 It's important to appreciate that all the effects on freedom that I've been discussing occur regardless of the rationale for the war or other crisis intervention itself. 271 00:40:05.600 --> 00:40:16.600 One may regard a war, for example, as ever so necessary and desirable or not, yet these effects will occur in any event. 272 00:40:16.600 --> 00:40:24.180 The logic of a government at war asserts itself in more or less the same fashion, regardless 273 00:40:24.180 --> 00:40:30.380 of the war's provocation and purpose, because every major war requires the government to 274 00:40:30.380 --> 00:40:38.020 take a much bigger bite out of the people's resources quickly, and it cannot do so successfully 275 00:40:38.020 --> 00:40:43.560 without suppressing many normal liberties and rights, especially those that might be 276 00:40:43.560 --> 00:40:49.840 be exercised to obstruct the government's wartime programs and policies, or to persuade 277 00:40:49.840 --> 00:40:55.640 people to resist the war or to demand its discontinuation or settlement. 278 00:40:55.640 --> 00:41:02.480 Hence, as Goring noted, the government and its supporters vigorously denounce all those 279 00:41:02.480 --> 00:41:08.600 who stand in the way as traitors, and the state encourages the masses to act as amateur 280 00:41:08.600 --> 00:41:32.440 Great peacetime activities operate similarly. Many historians have noted the parallels between 281 00:41:32.440 --> 00:41:38.560 the government's intimidating public efforts to entice or browbeat people into cooperation 282 00:41:38.560 --> 00:41:49.560 with the National Recovery Administration and the Nazi extravaganzas being staged in Germany at the same time. 283 00:41:49.560 --> 00:42:02.560 Nowadays, for example, the government frequently encourages all of us to report any suspicious persons or actions to the police or the FBI, ostensibly to prevent terrorism. 284 00:42:02.560 --> 00:42:19.560 Needless to say, no free society can exist when everyone, in effect, has enlisted as a government informant, especially when the character of the threatening persons and actions is so vague that it is bound to give rise to abuses. 285 00:42:19.560 --> 00:42:28.560 Not uncommonly now, people are reported for nothing more than looking like an Arab or for speaking a strange language to strange-looking companions. 286 00:42:28.560 --> 00:42:42.560 This insidious enlistment of informants, so reminiscent of the atrocious American Protective League during World War I, is turning our once open society into a sort of East Germany redux. 287 00:42:42.560 --> 00:42:51.560 Horror stories abound of perfectly innocent persons taken into custody for interrogation or worse. 288 00:42:51.560 --> 00:43:12.560 While the government promotes mindless support of its war-making and may induce a sort of patriotic hysteria in the most mentally fragile personalities, many citizens swing into action as foe patriots on strictly opportunistic grounds. 289 00:43:12.560 --> 00:43:21.560 War contractors, for example, may be able to position themselves to make a killing, so to speak, off of the actual killing. 290 00:43:21.560 --> 00:43:32.560 Moreover, they may parlay their wartime business as government suppliers into profitable post-war business that long outlives the war itself. 291 00:43:32.560 --> 00:43:56.560 The aircraft companies that suddenly profited so greatly during World War II, for example, became permanent, highly successful feeders at the government's trough, where some of them are feasting lavishly even now, the current administration's military buildup having proved a godsend for them and a boon to their stockholders. 292 00:43:56.560 --> 00:44:02.560 Other people simply want a cushy job in the government's expanded wartime bureaucracy. 293 00:44:02.560 --> 00:44:13.560 The so-called war on terror has given rise to a huge industry that has emerged almost from scratch during the past few years. 294 00:44:13.560 --> 00:44:21.560 According to a 2006 Forbes report, the Department of Homeland Security and its predecessor agencies 295 00:44:21.560 --> 00:44:34.560 paid private contractors at least $130 billion after 9-11, and other federal agencies have spent a comparable amount. 296 00:44:34.560 --> 00:44:46.560 Thus, besides the military-industrial congressional complex, we now have a parallel security-industrial congressional complex. 297 00:44:46.560 --> 00:45:03.560 Between 1999 and 2006, the number of Federal Homeland Security contractors increased from nine companies to 33,890. 298 00:45:03.560 --> 00:45:05.560 Let me repeat that. 299 00:45:05.560 --> 00:45:22.560 Between 1999 and 2006, the number of Federal Homeland Security contractors increased from nine companies to 33,890. 300 00:45:22.560 --> 00:45:25.560 And by now, there are certainly many more. 301 00:45:25.560 --> 00:45:52.560 and a multi-billion dollar industry selling supposed security related goods and services has emerged complete with specialized newsletters, magazines, websites, consultants, trade shows, job placement services and a veritable army of lobbyists working around the clock to widen the river of money that flows to these opportunists. 302 00:45:52.560 --> 00:46:01.400 As Paul Harris wrote, America is in the grip of a business based on fear. 303 00:46:01.400 --> 00:46:07.680 The last thing these vultures want, of course, is an abatement of the perceived terrorist 304 00:46:07.680 --> 00:46:13.960 threat and we can count on them to hype any signs of an increase in such threats and of 305 00:46:13.960 --> 00:46:19.800 course to crowd the trough happily slurping up the taxpayers' money. 306 00:46:19.800 --> 00:46:26.960 And I might say when you look at what they're selling, you've got to call it money for nothing. 307 00:46:26.960 --> 00:46:36.100 What chance does peace have when millions of well-heeled, politically-connected opportunists 308 00:46:36.100 --> 00:46:43.840 of all stripes depend on the continuation of a state of war for their personal financial 309 00:46:43.840 --> 00:46:46.960 success? 310 00:46:46.960 --> 00:46:52.100 For members of Congress, the Department of Homeland Security has quickly become the most 311 00:46:52.100 --> 00:46:58.480 magnificent dispenser of pork and patronage to come along in decades. If you haven't read 312 00:46:58.480 --> 00:47:05.480 Jim Bennett's book on this, do so. It's an eye-opener. Everyone is happy here, except 313 00:47:06.640 --> 00:47:11.100 for the beleaguered ordinary citizens whose pockets are being picked and whose liberties 314 00:47:11.100 --> 00:47:20.100 are being overridden by politicians and private sector predators with utter contempt for the people's intelligence and rights. 315 00:47:20.100 --> 00:47:36.100 Yet, so long as the people continue to be consumed by fear and to fall for the age-old swindle that the government seeks only to protect them, these abuses will never end. 316 00:47:36.100 --> 00:48:00.100 Along the Gulf Coast, where I live, during the past two years, a legion of opportunists has similarly rushed onto the scene to take advantage of the unprecedented sums of federal money pouring into the area in the guise of financing recovery from the damage wreaked by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 317 00:48:00.100 --> 00:48:04.100 Bank accounts have been stuffed with this loot, to be sure, 318 00:48:04.100 --> 00:48:10.100 but little in the way of genuine recovery and reconstruction has sprung from it. 319 00:48:10.100 --> 00:48:15.100 Never mind. In the immortal words of President Bush, 320 00:48:15.100 --> 00:48:20.100 brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. 321 00:48:20.100 --> 00:48:26.100 The ridiculous brownie was subsequently sacked as head of FEMA, of course, 322 00:48:26.100 --> 00:48:49.100 But the heck of a job goes on as before, all at taxpayer expense and at great profit for the corporatist cronies, political favorites and other privileged parties who are appropriating the people's money after it has been duly laundered through the Federal Treasury. 323 00:48:49.100 --> 00:48:56.100 Recall Margaret Atwood's poem, Siren Song, with which I prefaced my remarks. 324 00:48:56.100 --> 00:48:59.100 It begins, 325 00:48:59.100 --> 00:49:06.100 This is the one song everyone would like to learn, the song that is irresistible, 326 00:49:06.100 --> 00:49:18.100 the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons, even though they see the beached skulls. 327 00:49:18.100 --> 00:49:29.100 And the poem ends, alas, it is a boring song, but it works every time. 328 00:49:29.100 --> 00:49:41.100 In the present regard, it works every time because the people falsely believe that those who sing it are their protectors, rather than their exploiters. 329 00:49:41.100 --> 00:49:59.100 Until people learn to disregard the state's siren song of beneficence and protection, they will continue to suffer and die as victims of the state's wars, foreign and domestic. 330 00:49:59.100 --> 00:50:09.100 People yearn for security and they look to the state to provide it, but they are calling on a wolf to guard the sheep. 331 00:50:09.100 --> 00:50:27.100 The state cannot refrain from crime because it is an inherently criminal enterprise, living by robbery, which it relabels taxation, and retaining its turf by mass murder, which it relabels war. 332 00:50:27.100 --> 00:50:49.100 Constantly singing the siren song, it seduces the people by giving back to them a portion of what it has previously extorted from them and by ceaselessly claiming to protect them from all manner of threats to their lives, liberties, property and even their self-esteem. 333 00:50:49.100 --> 00:51:16.100 If it protects them at all, however, it does so only as a shepherd protects his captive flock, not because he recognizes and respects the natural rights of the sheep, but only to keep them unmolested in his sole possession and control until he finds it expedient to shear or slaughter them. 334 00:51:16.100 --> 00:51:36.100 A peaceful state is an impossibility. Even a state that refrains from fighting foreigners goes on fighting its own subjects continuously to keep them under control and to suppress competitors who might try to break into the domain of its protection racket. 335 00:51:36.100 --> 00:51:56.100 The people cry out for security, yet they will not take responsibility for their own protection, and like the mariners of Greek mythology, they leap overboard immediately in response to the state's siren song. 336 00:51:56.100 --> 00:52:08.100 When the Israelites had fled from their captivity in Egypt, they made due for centuries with only judges. 337 00:52:08.100 --> 00:52:15.100 Yet they were not satisfied, and eventually they demanded a king crying out, 338 00:52:15.100 --> 00:52:30.100 We will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles. 339 00:52:30.100 --> 00:52:40.100 Well, they got a king, all right, just as we Americans have embraced one of our own, though we call ours a president. 340 00:52:40.100 --> 00:52:53.100 The Israelites, as the prophet Samuel had warned, were no better off for having a king. However, King Saul only led them from one slaughter to another. 341 00:52:53.100 --> 00:53:01.300 Likewise, our rulers have led us from one unnecessary slaughter to the next. 342 00:53:01.300 --> 00:53:08.800 And to make matters worse, they have exploited each such occasion to fasten their chains around 343 00:53:08.800 --> 00:53:11.680 us more tightly. 344 00:53:11.680 --> 00:53:20.760 Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans shall never have real, lasting peace so long 345 00:53:20.760 --> 00:53:27.440 as long as we give our allegiance to a king. That is, in our case, to the whole conglomeration 346 00:53:27.440 --> 00:53:34.440 of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the state. Thank you very much.