[00:03] hello everybody thanks for joining us for another edition of racquel million live today i got a very special guest John Kiriakou American Hero CIA whistleblower the only man to do time over our nation's torture program he did time for exposing that torture program well the director of that torture program Gina Haspel bloody Gina as they call her it was promoted to
[00:35] you know run the CIA so that should tell us all we need to know about the morals of our government but today I want to talk to him about the state of our democracy specifically I want to talk about how our for-profit imperialism and military-industrial complex tie into our domestic police state apparatus and more importantly how we as a society collectively accept this status quo and not only think it's okay
[01:08] but in many instances think that this is necessary for a functioning democracy which is you know nothing could be further from the truth so you know I got John Kiriakou here today John how are you holding up how's your family doing being the subject of such a vicious prosecution how are you dealing thanks Rocco you know it's it's been a long road but finally things have have turned around for us you know this whole
[07:52] you for that and and that brings me to the next question here because when I watched some of your earlier stuff it seems like you were still a little bit disillusioned like we all were we all bought into the war on terror and different things and you know and so it seems like you were actually for enhanced interrogation and different things when you thought that it worked that's it that's it it's a common misconception you're talking about an interview that I gave to ABC News in
[08:25] December of 2007 I think I I think I was trying to be too analytic in that in that interview and what I what I said was I tried to make a differentiation so what I said was that the enhanced interrogation techniques were torture I said that we shouldn't be doing them because they were torture but there was a secondary issue I said and that was the issue of whether it worked and this is like a had been
[08:56] telling us from the very beginning that it worked that they had developed actionable intelligence that saved American lives and disrupted attacks that turned out to be a lie but we didn't know that that was a lie until the CIA was forced to declassify the Inspector General's report that report was written in 2005 it was finally Declassified in the spring of 2009 and only then did we see that the whole thing was a lie that the only
[09:28] actionable information that they collected was actually collected by the FBI before the torture program began and what they did is they threw out all the FBI people from the secret site and then they took the information that the FBI had been reporting they put it into the CIA reporting cables and said look what we got this is what he gave us it's incredible information we're gonna save American lives but it was all just a lie unreal unreal so you you stood up for
[09:59] your morals even it has nothing to do with whether it's effective or not you're against it on the moral ground yeah that where we as Americans we don't get into the torture business and not just moral ground but also the legal ground and the reason that's important to me is is this we're supposed to be a nation of laws we're supposed to be a nation that's governed by a living breathing Constitution yes and most the time we're not we pretend we are the
[10:30] thing is that in 1946 we executed Japanese war criminals who had waterboarded American POWs we X that was an executable death penalty offense to waterboard somebody in January 1968 January the 11th 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner on the very day that that picture ran the Secretary of
[11:02] Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation that soldier was arrested he was charged torture and he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in Leavenworth Wow between 1945 and today the law never changed we changed we sure did what what 2002 did was it turned the law on its head now just because Jay Bybee and John you said that this program was legal because
[11:34] of their interpretation of the law did not make it legal because nobody ever challenged the law in court so it was my position then just like it is now that it was always illegal and I agree with that I absolutely agree with that you know it's just obviously if you look at the law you I I served in the military I'm familiar with the Uniform Code of Military Justice there's no gray area in
[12:04] that regard you know that's the whole thing but in so you were you stood against in terror you stood on morals and ethics but at the same time we both kind of we both bought the lie of the war on terror your this is this is my next question do you see how counterproductive the war on terror is from from Jump Street being that we actually made and trained and funded a lot of these terror organizations from
[12:35] the beginning it has been an unmitigated disaster everything from the the so-called war on terror to the passage of the Patriot Act to NSA's new new powers to spy on Americans which the NSA Charter specifically prohibits yeah you know the bottom line here Rocco is that over the long run Osama bin Laden won this thing he won he wanted to force us to take our
[13:08] freedoms away he wanted to impact our economy and to force us to voluntarily give up our freedoms and that's exactly what we've done I mean he's gotten getting on an airplane now is is most prohibitively difficult little you walking into a federal building or something like that exactly you hit the nail right on the head and I knew you know I knew there was a reason why you were why you were willing to blow the whistle and why you
[13:39] were willing to stand for your values and ethics and and it shows it shines through when we talk to you you know about the kind of person you are and in the kind of America that you signed up to protect in the fight for you know there's something here - is that my my prosecution and not just my prosecution but the prosecution's of seven other national security whistleblowers all
[14:09] took place during the Obama administration the Republicans that went after us it was the Democrats yeah just insane to me but but between the passage of the of the Espionage Act in 1917 and Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 there were three Espionage Act prosecutions against Americans who had spoken to the press just under Obama there were eight Oh as many as all previous presidents
[14:41] combined you know Obama had this Nixonian obsession with leaks and he really was the enemy of transparency and of whistleblowers yeah that is such a crazy thing too because he ran on the exact opposite you know he ran against the Patriot Act he ran on transparency any government most transparent president in history and nothing could have been further from the truth yeah and people just they don't want to see this stuff and and that's why I'm
[15:13] hoping you know with a with a person like you with your voice I am I'm desperately hoping that real people real Americans see this and start to examine their previously held positions and beliefs I hope so I hope so it's I think it's it's so incredibly important you know let me give you another little tidbit - in 2013 Mark Halperin and John Holliman - famous political journalists here in Washington
[15:43] came out with a book called Double Down it was it was a book about the 2012 presidential campaign and it was a follow-up to their book on the 2008 campaign well Obama agreed to sit for an interview for this book and he said two things that were absolutely shocking to me one he said very simply I never said I was a liberal like understand why people thought he was he was progressive because he wasn't people are into
[16:16] thinking that he was the other thing was even more shocking and disgusting he was talking about the drone program and he said almost like introspectively he said I never had any idea that I would be so good at killing people in her disgusting what he meant by that was in in the last month of George Bush's presidency he killed two people with the use of a drone in Barack Obama's last month as
[16:46] president he killed 424 people with drones so it was Obama that made this wanton killing of anybody and you know it was the Obama a Defense Department that made a decision that any male over the age of 14 was considered to be an enemy combatant so you can the fourteen-year-old kid just walking down the street in your village you're an enemy combatant and we're gonna fire a Hellfire missile at you and that's what
[17:18] we do that is so sick I mean it completely takes away due process from the whole thing even American citizens you know I mean that that's a thing - Obama is the first president to kill American citizens without yeah well everybody's heard of Anwar Awlaki very bad guy Al Qaeda's propagandist I agree I followed the guy's career he was very bad guy but he's an American citizen and as an American citizen he has the
[17:49] constitutional right to face his accusers in a court of law so yes the bad guy that the Obama administration wanted us to believe that he was lay out the evidence even try him in absentia lay out the evidence so we can see it we deserve to see it because we're Americans but he didn't said he just fired a missile from a drone and killed him to make matters worse a week after we killed a lackey we fired two
[18:20] more missiles into the same village and we killed a lackeys sixteen-year-old son and his 16 year old nephew both American citizens we never we have a policy of never apologizing when we kill people you know accidentally or kind of on purpose accidentally and all we said was that that the targeting information was faulty that's all that we said but we killed those kids so that they wouldn't grow up and become terrorists I mean
[18:51] that's really what we did and ironically that's gonna create more terrorists I mean when you're I personally captured more than four dozen al-qaeda fighters after 9/11 personally I interrogated them personally and I can tell you that almost to a man they would say that they really had no beef with the United States until we bomb their village and then we need your dad or we killed their
[19:21] sister or we killed their grandmother and then what else are they gonna do they have to take up arms against us because we're just wanted Lee bombing their village in a country that we're not at war with you know and that happens that that's that's kind of like what you know when I was watching you and you were talking about capturing Abu Zubaydah and you were talking and you were like you know I was talking this guy he was crying like a little baby and and I couldn't even hate this guy he
[19:52] was pathetic and you said he was the young kid it wasn't the sophistic mastermind evil genius that they tried to make him out to be he was in kid he was only in his early 20s and I said to him he was like he was bleeding to death in this bad as as quickly as they could pump blood into him it was just leaking out it was in this big pool under his bed we had blood all over us and I said to him I should hate you I should want to kill you and I don't
[20:22] I said you're pathetic and I said to this this FBI agent walked in he came to bring me some food and um and I said to him this is the fearsome al-qaeda this is what we're so afraid of exactly they got lucky on one day they got lucky one time and then we built them up in our minds to be this incredible omnipotent omniscient terrorist force and they weren't they were just a bunch of moms
[20:53] and kids thank you but more than that you know I see it as the war on terror is completely a self-inflicted wound like we team up with right-wing extremist groups worldwide in proxy wars against left-wing socialist or communist movements so whether you're talking about the Contras in South America Vietnam and Cambodia or in Afghanistan yeah but Afghanistan or now Afghanistan in the war on terror you know we go in
[21:24] and we we fund armed and trained the Taliban and we call them freedom fighters we call Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter you know against big bad red Russia because god forbid we get democracy in our workplace that's really what this comes down to in my eyes you know in the 1980s in the mid to late 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president there was a delegation of members of the Taliban who were invited to the White
[21:54] House to meet with Reagan and I know this because a former boss of mine was the translator for that meeting and so one of the members of that delegation was a guy named Haqqani Haqqani went on to ally himself with al-qaeda and he's the leader of something that's now called the Haqqani network it was the Haqqani network that was responsible for the capture of Bowe Bergdahl the the soldier who had walked off base and was also responsible for
[22:25] the kidnapping and rape and torture of the Canadian couple that was just released a year ago they're here how Connie was invited like a VIP to the White House because when they were killing Russians they were okay exactly they killed enough Russians that the Russians left Afghanistan and then what do you do with them right you radicalized them you've armed them you've given them more money than they could ever count you know there's a famous kind of semi tongue-in-cheek thing we used to say at the CIA that you
[22:57] can't buy an Afghan warlord but you certainly can rent one that was the truth I mean we were dropping millions and millions of dollars in cash out of the side of helicopters just to get these guys to do what we wanted them to do for you know a couple of weeks or a couple of months at a time exactly and that's what this all comes down to and we get all these forms of blowback from these proxy wars whether you're talking about the war on drugs whether you're talking about the war on terror you know
[23:29] when we went into South America and we empowered the Contras against the sandanista government in Nicaragua you know we ended up you know we turned a blind eye to human rights violations we turned a blind eye drug trafficking because we had to raise money off the books because you know Congress wasn't going to approve of it and the American people wouldn't have approved of it so we this is a consequence we end up
[23:59] having a cocaine epidemic in America and at the same time we're inflicting more draconian drug laws in America so we get like the sentencing disparities where you see black kids getting charged with a hundred to one sentencing compared to a yuppie on Wall Street getting selling a gram of cocaine powder it what I'm trying to get to is you get all this blowback and now in and and the same thing kind of happens we
[24:29] first we empower the Taliban we make a monster like you were saying we give them training weapons and logistical support and to fight the Russians once they push the Russians out they start to turn their gaze against us and and and then thing is is we then we go in and we empower Muhammad Karzai whose brother is that is the biggest heroin trafficker in the whole region and let me add something to that from from 2009 to 2011
[25:00] I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and I went to Afghanistan I guess it was late 2009 I went to Afghanistan because I was doing a study on heroin poppy the cultivation of heroin poppy Afghanistan produces 93 percent of the world's heroin and we generally don't care because almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and Russia and if the Iranians and the Russians are heroin addicts we don't care so I am I got in a helicopter
[25:33] military helicopter and I flew from Bagram Air Base to a village called Lashkar Gah which is the capital of Helmand province and Helmand province is is ground zero for the cultivation of heroin poppy in the whole world so I went out into the fields and I'm not exaggerating when I tell you as far as the eye can see for miles in any direction all you see is heroin poppy and I said to this farmer very naively as it turned out I
[26:04] said let me ask you a question why don't you grow crops that have two growing seasons instead of poppy grow onions or tomatoes or pomegranates or carrots or you know things like that he gets this like exasperated look up in his face he goes oh because we know the CIA told me in 2001 I could grow all the poppy I wanted if I told them where the Arabs were and now you come and you tell me I can't grow poppy I wish you guys
[26:37] would make up your minds when the CIA told you you could grow heroin poppy and this kernel that I was with said I think we need to leave it right there we're gonna head back to my room and they would not let the guy answer me so I wrote this up as part of a formal research paper for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry took the entire thing out took it all out yeah well that's my point though I mean now we got this heroin epidemic we flood the whole world with really cheap
[27:08] good heroin at the same time we're inflicting domestic we're inflicting more draconian drug laws so basically the DEA is terrorizing doctors they can't be compassionate even me as a disabled vet I've had multiple spinal surgeries I can't get legal drugs I'm forced to go onto the black market and when you're when you forced a play doctor with no medical oversight you start to get overdoses left and right and all these more disease more crime or
[27:39] you know more police terror all these different things and so I see all of these these problems is self-inflicted wounds all about profit because let's remember you know drugs have nothing the drug war has nothing to do with public safety we already have legal synthetic counter counterparts for every illegal drug on the for-profit health care side so people need to understand this you know the the whole thing about this is
[28:11] is our government is dropping the ball everywhere we see our government putting profit over its constitutional mandate to the general welfare we get all these problems but yet somehow they get us collectively you agree and accept this horrible fascist government like lemming is going right off the cliff one after the other you know this this is this points to the corruption of the entire system we can't just blame whatever administration happens to be in the
[28:42] White House yes blame Congress too because Congress has constitutionally divine constitutionally I just the word just slipped out of my out of my head let and dated not constitutionally mandated oversight Authority which they do not exercise you know and since the Citizens United decision in the Supreme Court the corporations have just taken over our government two of the three branches they've just taken it over indeed in many states it's all three branches because in half the states in this
[29:13] country state judges are elected rather than appointed there's no end in sight until until we change the the very way that we conduct our elections well I think education is the key that change will only come from the bottom up the people in power now they don't care there's no they have no impetus to change you know so the whole thing is though I was surprised to learn I follow a guy named dr. Joe Firestone and he
[29:43] talks a lot about the Constitution and different things in the when it comes to Citizens United Congress has article three section two it's called the exceptions clause when Congress can make any law out of the reach of the Supreme Court so if Congress wanted to we can you know in in essence you know overturn Citizens United tomorrow yes you know but they don't want to and they want you to think that their hands are tied they're collecting millions and millions
[30:15] of dollars from the corporations you know part of the problem too is that is that the House of Representatives is elected every two years and so they're constantly campaigning you're constantly running for re-election and the only way you could do that is with money now media markets have become so expensive that to run for a job that pays a hundred eighty thousand dollars you need to spend a million or two million to win the election you know in Florida there's
[30:46] a Senate race going on right now between bill bill Nelson who's the incumbent senator he's a Democrat and the incumbent governor who's running against him Governor Scott and it's projected to be the most expensive political race in American history other than the presidency that they're each going to spend a hundred to a hundred and fifty million dollarz again for a job that pays a hundred and eighty grand yes something's not right there yeah that definitely shows you and then the other thing
[31:17] Congress has a worse approval rating than her piece yet they somehow get reelected over 90 percent at a time and did you know Congress's approval rating as a whole as a body is the same as pedophiles yeah rating yeah yeah and yet they get reelected over 90 percent at a time you know something because people hate everybody else's congressman yeah yeah it's the same when they want to
[31:48] stop pork they want to stop the pork projects everywhere except for your district it's but so what we like to talk about we focus on economics at real progressives because all problems in our society have their roots and economics and they have their macroeconomic solutions now I don't mean we could ever have a utopia where there's no problems but we can definitely have a better society than we have today and one of the big things that we advocate for is a
[32:20] federally guaranteed living wage job program for every single person that wants one all right because when you learn economic truth you understand that government never needs to look for money article one section eight mandates that our Congress mint and tax for the general welfare and common defense thereof so the money part of the equation is always infinite for our government the only thing that matters is our government makes the required investments into our society and
[32:51] productive capacity to ensure enough real resources are created so that we can buy them with with that money and it's not like this is a new or radical idea but we did this incredibly successfully in 1934 with passage of the Works Progress Administration yes look what it gave us we have we have bridges and post offices and hospitals and other buildings that were built by the WPA in the late 1930s that are still standing and still in use now what we also have is bridges that
[33:25] are falling into the rivers below them because we don't spend any money on upkeep because we're busy spending seven hundred and seventy billion dollars on defense which is more than the next eight countries combined so imagine if we didn't spend these outrageous ridiculous amounts of money on what really it's on national offense not even really national defense imagine the school's the the roads the bridges the airports the infrastructure free college for everybody
[33:55] a living wage for everybody who wants a job I mean it would be not just a different country but but a different world yeah we did it like you said we went from the Great Depression to the number one world superpower you know with deficit spending to invest in our society in a matter of a decade yeah but the whole thing that is is you know and this is where a lot of people even well-meaning people on the Left get it wrong they think that we have to tax the rich or we have to cut defense so the
[34:26] government can spend on society you know government always has infinite spending capacity even if we cut the military a hundred percent and we tax the rich ninety-nine percent of their wealth that doesn't give our government one extra dollar to spend it already has infinite spending capacity so my thing is you know and this is what we try to say on real progressives we do need to tax the rich we do need to cut the fence but for moral reasons never for financial reasons and we need to separate the tax
[34:58] fight from the spending fight you know we don't need to put any unnecessary fights on top of spending for the public purpose right now there's people that are dying for no other reason than a lack of cash I mean that's sadistic and our you know our government taxation creates unemployment so that it can have people to provision society using paid employment there's no it was not that east wall street journal' saying that the federal
[35:29] reserve board is considering ways to raise up employment yes it's better to keep inflation low so they're not even discussing the human misery that's involved with throwing people out of work they're saying that it's better to throw people out of work than for inflation to go from 2% to 4% yeah and I knew you were a smart guy and you would get this I knew it that that's
[35:59] the thing the Federal Reserve it has two mandates full employment and price stability it seems like since the 70s all they've worried about is price stability and and we've targeted unemployment and people don't get this we target 5% unemployment so right now we're at 4% unemployment that means that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates right to try to create more unemployment this will get people which people would rather get free interest instead of expanding their business and
[36:29] hiring people yeah so that's the whole thing that we're trying to say well we got millions of people that were forcing to be unemployed and poor even if every single worker had the best job skills even if every single worker had the most motivation to work if our government's targeting 5% unemployment we're going to have millions of people forced to be unemployed and poor and that's not how you get civil society that's the opposite that's how you get a dog-eat-dog world right and it's especially when you consider like you
[37:00] were saying our communities are crumbling across America there's starved of human resources and and UN infrastructure think about in Flint Michigan kids drinking poisoned water bridges collapsing you know and this is work that will not get done by the private sector you know and and only in government is mandated to provide for the general welfare so of course it's up the government to maximize that productive capacity and you know raise everybody's standard of living in
[37:30] America and the whole thing is is if they won't do that they don't want us to understand that Congress can always make dollars by law from thin air to satisfy its constitutional mandate because then we would demand they do so we would not accept anything else we would not except pointless austerity that kills just like bullets you know and that's the whole thing about this I got to come I have to comment on the comment I keep looking to the left here because I'm looking and Rob Baxter makes an
[38:02] important point here he says real unemployment is much higher than four to five percent he's right it's much higher than that for two reasons number one we don't count people who are so discouraged that they drop out of the job market so they're unemployed but they're not counted as unemployed second in 1982 Ronald Reagan decided to include the military as employed Americans for all of American history until 1982 the military was separate well that
[38:33] automatically reduced the unemployment rate by something like 0.2 or 0.3 percentage points and so the unemployment rate really is artificially low yeah I live in Arlington Virginia now I grew up in New Castle Pennsylvania you know and so unemployment was always high from from 1979 when the Youngstown Sheet and tube closed and everything all the mills went out of business unemployment was really high I live in Arlington Virginia now the local paper comes out every Wednesday and they have the unemployment rate
[39:04] every week it's 1.7 percent here in Arlington well it can't be really 1.7 percent it's impossible to maintain a number like that it's just not it's just not doable in real life and so what rob backs are saying is true that there are a lot of people who are unemployed who just are not counted in the numbers yeah that's exactly right but the what I go by is this if we had a federally guaranteed living wage job on offer
[39:36] today economist like Pavlina Chernova and people like dr. Joe Firestone they estimated about 15 million to 25 million people would sign up for that program so to me that's the true that's the true unemployment underemployment number yes 15 to 25 million people and that's that's not a good economy you know that's the exact opposite a couple of year of your viewers are also pointing out that prison the prison
[40:08] population is not included now prisoners are the only people in America who are forced according to the Constitution they are forced to work so slavery is actually legal in the prison system and in what most of these prisoners do I think Americans generally don't understand this what most of these prisoners do is they are involved in manufacturing the prison where I served my time FCI Loretto it's in central Pennsylvania near Johnstown they manufacture a fiber optic cable for the
[40:40] military well guess what there are four or five other companies around the country that manufacture fiber optic cable for the military but if FC Colorado pays its employees 40 cents an hour and everybody else pays their employees 20 or 25 dollars an hour guess who's gonna go out of business and guess who's not gonna go out of business that's right it's unfair out that that run call centers you know if you want to call call in an order for example on your credit card eight times out of ten
[41:10] it's a prisoner who's going to be taking your information taking your credit card number and those guys stuff I made I made 16 cents a month when I was a senior that was my salary 16 cents a month so it really see that and that incentivizes the whole thing when you give prisons incentive to keep their prisons filled they're making money by keeping their prisons fill now they're gonna go out there get like I know in New Castle they make sure they have prisoners in the jail you know they they
[41:43] that that's the only reason that jail agreed to build a new jail here not to get too far off the subject but but the the problem with that I mean there are several but the big problem with that is that most of these prisons that we're talking about whether they're prisons or whether they're local jails are privately run by a [ __ ] civic I used to be called CCA and geo global and the only way that these companies can can return value to their shareholders is by cutting costs so they need to keep the
[42:14] prisons full they make money that way and secondly they cut costs so where do you cut costs food and medical care and that's why people drop dead every day in American prisons from preventable illnesses and diseases because it costs them less if you just drop dead that it does for them to actually treat you and feed you human great food that's so true and the whole thing about this is again this is another part where we see our government putting the profits at a 1% over its
[42:46] constitutional mandate that a general welfare I like to say we privatized the public space and we deregulate everything you starve the economy of public spending to force us all in the private credit just a consume production and survive because private credit always dries up this leads to booms busts and bailouts that only help the rich it's only it's only capitalist economies that have recessions you know your head because that's the nature of capitalism it's the boom-bust cycle
[43:19] other other non amis planned economies for example whether they're socialist or otherwise they don't have recessions and went well they usually don't when they do they're not as severe as the recessions that we get well I'm glad you brought that up I'd like to point out that even America is more or less a planned economy when you look at the fact that capitalism really only exists in the private sector and only to the extent that our socially own government allows you know our government owns the
[43:49] private sector with its ability to impose tax and be the monopoly issuer of the only tax credit dollars plus it has its legislative authority too so the just like China nobody even owns property in America we all rent you know we all pay tax and the only free market is the black market you know so in reality capitalism is an illusion you know and anywhere that we see capitalism or the for-profit markets hurting society that's that's not even
[44:22] the phone of the 1% or the corporations it's a fault of our government for not regulating properly not doing its job and this is where people get confused and they they they you know they think that all well and even on the left good good meaning people they'll say oh we can't do nothing until we kill capitalism where we can't do nothing until we tax the rich I know yeah I hear that all the time yeah yeah and they and I try to tell them look it's not revolutionary to say we can't save lives
[44:53] until we kill capitalism all right god we don't need to kill capitalism we need to understand economic reality so that we don't fall victim to the lies and scare tactics that the rollin class used to keep us divided and fighting against our own interests and once we unite once we understand even Republicans once they understand their taxes don't have to go up to pay for other people's mistakes or to pay for increased in living standards they're even Republicans are less likely
[45:26] to oppose public purpose spending they love their kids too they want to have good things they won't have a nice society too it's just right now the ruling class they know that if they can make people think that money is finite you know then people are less likely to help someone at the bottom get more because that would mean they get less you know or some game for these people or or even think about the the national debt they're constantly trying to tell
[45:56] us is it some big bird in some thing it's going to be a burden on future generations but if you just look at simple double-entry bookkeeping the government's debt is our asset in the non government those are dollars in existence if our national debt was 0 we would have zero dollars in existence that would be the only way the national debt could burden us you know that's true ya know I'm glad you're on the same page now real quick I want to go over to finance the debt we sell government
[46:28] bonds which we have to do anyway to keep the economy afloat well what's that yeah that's part of an ARB it's it's part of an obscure rule that we used when we were on the gold standard we had that because if you if you would raise the net money supply without raising the gold that backs it then they devalue your money but we're not on the gold standard no more so really Congress the Congress doesn't even have to offset deficits with barns anymore if it was
[46:59] really a big problem like they act like it is we can just you know do away with the national debt and just you know have the federal reserve pay interest directly on on reserves you know that that's so this is all it's all a smokescreen to keep us accepting artificial scarcity and in my eyes and keep us fighting against each other so we don't unite to force our government to satisfy its constitutional mandate and now the one thing I think we all
[47:30] need to push for is that as a federally guaranteed living wage job program because it it destroys so many of our problems so many of our systemic problems and I'll just go through a few quick ways instead of fighting for a minimum wage per se a federal living wage job program makes the minimum wage the living wage without even a mandate to the private sector either they be either they beat the federal living wage and working conditions or they can't attract the
[48:01] labor workforce from the job guarantee now it also restores democracy it kills gerrymandering it empowers minorities in LGBT and women it does all of this with extreme mobility if your city or local government doesn't treat you good doesn't work for the common good you could simply get up and go to a city or state government that does knowing that you have a living wage job waiting for you wherever you go and what that
[48:32] does that a substandard City they lose their tax base and their ability to operate because they really are revenue constrained they can't make their own dollars like the federal government right so this in essence would make local governments work to keep citizens happy or else they lose their tax base and ability to operate in the last the last point it really revolution as a society is it even fights for profit imperialism by ending the military's employer of last resort status yes dis destroy the military's
[49:05] ability to recruit poor people all over the place no longer would we be the precarious class people like me would be able to stay home with a living wage job rebuilding my own community in green sustainable ways and without people to fight their for-profit wars they our government would be forced to abandon its goals of empire and truly defend our nation's sovereignty and our peoples rights against all enemies foreign and domestic from rogue nations to our domestic capitalist class so to me the
[49:37] federal job guarantee is the main thing that we can do to fix so many of our systemic problems you you worried about addiction you're worried about gun problems terrorism this is how you restore hope on a systemic level people are getting camaraderie working together in their communities you know and it brings a sense of society back in community and solidarity on every level I really believe that this is the answer
[50:09] what do you think about that when when I when I tell you when you hear about that hey honestly I have to agree with you you know without without a living wage we hold ourselves back as a country we hold ourselves back as an economy everybody somebody pointed out here in the comments a minute ago if a person has to work two or three part-time jobs to to make a living that's not employment that's not a living wage no American should have to work three
[50:40] part-time jobs to put food on the table everybody has I believe everybody has a right to to food clothing and shelter now yes you you ought to earn it but the government should be there to help people earn it you know this is another thing too with passage of the Social Security Act in the 1930s as a country we we got to the point where we believed as a nation we believed in a social safety net yes but that's changed in the last couple of
[51:10] decades there's this there's this you know this attitude now that that people should worry only about their own problems they shouldn't worry about the rest of society well if you don't worry about the rest of society then we have nothing there's nothing that makes us special as a country you know we we all like to believe we mean we may not admit it to ourselves but we all like to believe at least in a form of American exceptionalism but we're not exceptional because we let so many of our citizens
[51:41] down you're absolutely right and the whole thing is is you you can't just ignore everything else if you let people starve and be in pain all the time this brings down everybody's standard of life you can't walk to the playground with your daughter because you know society so crazy people can't eat so society's violent and dysfunctional repute oh thanks yes yeah I mean and it doesn't take a PhD to understand you know it's
[52:12] just it's common sense you know and and what we do I think the ruling class they in America they're so adapted propaganda and they you know in going and getting people to agree with or getting people to fight against their own interests and not even realize it you know and and that that's the thing they they use these right-wing lies and scare tactics to kind of keep us fighting against each
[52:43] other they'll tell us you know people on welfare are just lazy and you know they can go out and get a job but like we just said when our government targets 5% unemployment you're forcing millions of people to be unemployed and poor and more than possible sense at all yeah but even more than that when our government targets unemployment we're keeping a buffer stock of unemployed for capital to wage war on labor with so now your boss doesn't have to give you that raise
[53:14] they have millions of people outside unemployed and they're so desperate they'll work for starvation wages that's why our wages have been stagnant from the 70 well corporate profits cost-of-living in productivity or at record highs and so this isn't by accident this is this is our government actively engaged in class warfare they're actively working for the profits at a 1% over its constitutional mandate to the general welfare in every
[53:45] aspect when we see from the war on terror and our for-profit imperialism and to the war on drugs and you know everything you know they they tell us one thing and do another and you know this is how you know we end up living in the biggest terrorist state in the world you know people good guys give you an example of exactly what you're talking about Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world he owns Amazon he owns the Washington
[54:15] Post he owns Amazon Cloud Services he's worth a hundred and eighty seven billion dollars well just in the past week according to today's Wall Street Journal just in the past week he made an extra three and a half billion dollars and that is yeah three and a half billion dollars and that is because of deals that he continues to sign with the government he signed a four hundred million dollar deal with the CIA to provide cloud services he signed a 1.2
[54:47] billion dollar deal with the Pentagon to provide cloud services and then at the same time he owns the Washington Post where he attacks Donald Trump every single day now in Seattle where Amazon is headquartered the Seattle City Council a couple of weeks ago passed a new tax that would charge employers 15 cents per hour per employee and that 15 cents would go to relieving the homeless problem it would go to to building
[55:19] low-income housing and to getting homeless people off the streets Jeff Bezos went so crazy when this thing was passed that he threatened to actually pull Amazon out of Seattle and so the the vote to impose the tax had been 9 to nothing three weeks ago last week it was seven to two to repeal the tax and today now at the same time Amazon employees say on websites like like glassdoor.com that they're
[55:53] non-union they make barely the minimum wage and when they're working in states that are not Union states the so-called right-to-work states I call it right to work for less states they're not allowed to take breaks during an eight-hour shift and so they have to pee in water bottles oh my god working because they're not permitted to leave their station now this is working for a guy who's worth a hundred and eighty seven billion dollars that's exactly what's
[56:23] wrong with this country and with its economy here exactly right that exactly shows how much of a danger this excess wealth can be to a democracy you know you look at New Castle Pennsylvania we were just ruled you know one of the only cities in the state that is allowed to grow the weed for the rest of the state from medicinal marijuana program because we're a distressed City a lot of problems well anyway they give the contract to one company to go down
[56:55] Industrial Street my owning town and make one big company that will bring about thirty to fifty low-to-mid wage jobs now had they just allowed individuals to grow marijuana and sell straight to the exchanges you know you would have seen a huge boom people would have been making money at the individual level investing in their and in in New Castle tax revenues would have went up for Newcastle then they could have been investing those revenues back into the society you know we could have
[57:26] completely jump-started our economy and instead we see our government work for the private profits of the few and everybody else's expense and yeah and so this is what it all comes down to if we could just if we all just learn how our economy actually works from the macro level you know not from the individual level mmt was what I preach it's counterproductive I mean it's counterintuitive because how we think of our personal budget has nothing to do
[57:57] with the federal budget of the of the government because they make their own dollars we don't but because this is it's such simple logic literally I'm a high school dropout anybody could understand this stuff simply by diving into the material you can overcome any cognitive dissonance and once you know how our economy works you can't be fooled by any neoliberal you know agenda or narrative that they want to use you see right through all the partisan BS and so this is how if we had a pub that
[58:34] understood there is literally no way that our government would be able to get us to accept this artificial scarcity this pointless austerity that kills so many people to begin with so please for all the viewers look up dr. stephanie kelton look up dr. fidel kaboom look up dr. Bill Mitchell Pavlina trinova economist Ellis winning him even economist Republican economist Mike I
[59:06] forget his name now guy I just went blank but you know even Republicans when they understand our operational reality like Mike Norman he's a Republican economist he's to the left of anybody in the DNC he's fit a left of Bernie Sanders and he's a Republican because he understands how our economy works you know so it's mmt i like to say it's non-ideological it's just a simple description of how our economy works using scientific fact and that only then
[59:39] can we unite and defeat all these lies and scare tactics that keep us divided and fighting against each other so yeah i mean i and i really like to see you personally you join real progressives with us because you know we need your integrity we need your voice I know you got your show too yeah happy to do it yeah thanks I'll give you some more information after the show and we'll get you signed up because you you know if we
[1:00:11] can get people to copy what you did and to have it to be a little bit inspired by you know the sacrifice that you made maybe we could get people to stand up wherever they're at in in and say no to the status quo we hope you know the the one thing that I'm most proud of what made it all worthwhile was in the summer of 2015 Congress passed the McCain from Stein amendment which which formally banned torture specifically those those
[1:00:44] techniques that the CIA was using and and John McCain said after after it was signed into law that it was only because of my revelations in 2007 that that law was possible and so you know as as hard as it was and as long a road as it's been it was totally worth it because now this is the law of the land and at least I have that to be proud of absolutely John I mean without your sacrifice we might still be doing that torture
[1:01:15] program right now a matter of fact I know we Banton yeah we probably would and another thing to Here I am sitting in my in my prison cell one day reading a week-old copy of the New York Times and and there's an article it's an interview with Ed Snowden and Snowden said that that he watched my case and he watched Tom Drake's case at NSA and he said Drake and kiri aku inspired me to go public Wow myself oh my god I said
[1:01:46] it's known as the most important whistleblower of the last you know half century since Daniel Ellsberg and and to have inspired somebody like him we would have no idea that our government was spying on us head about it no no idea so that made it worth it right there and John McCain they made it all worthwhile yeah definitely and so guys pay attention when when people sacrificed their lives when they
[1:02:18] sacrificed their free to bring us the truth to show us what our nation is doing in our names please pay attention listen and reevaluate your previously held positions previously held beliefs okay what is not to lose question everything exactly remember they work for us exactly and United they cannot deny as a working
[1:02:49] class United will win every time they can't we don't need to be violent we don't know that you know all we got to do is unite in solidarity and general strike that's all we got to do we could force our socially own government to satisfy its constitutional mandate to the general welfare of society first and foremost just like we did coming out of the Great Depression back in the day so thank you a lot John do you want to close out anything to say in closing thank you for your support it's great to
[1:03:22] talk to you I miss Newcastle very much you know we miss you we miss you too like I said I was just talking to somebody yesterday and they went out of their way to say make sure you tell him I we love always a friend of a bit he's a big friend of the family everyone I talked to about you has very good things to say so keep up the good work you're an inspiration thank you so much for coming on and I look forward to working with you again on real progressives thank you and thanks to it to all of your viewers thank you thanks for your
[1:03:53] thanks I appreciate that okay take it easy take care