[00:05.030 --> 00:07.630]  This next man has been at HOPE.
[00:07.630 --> 00:09.270]  This is his third HOPE conference.
[00:09.630 --> 00:12.370]  And he always creates a ruckus.
[00:13.230 --> 00:13.950]  Jello Biafra.
[00:25.710 --> 00:27.630]  Oh no, a podium.
[00:27.990 --> 00:33.550]  Do I have to adopt my dad's posture now in order to communicate with everyone here?
[00:33.570 --> 00:35.330]  What can we do about this?
[00:36.110 --> 00:36.750]  Hmm.
[00:38.390 --> 00:39.610]  Okay, hang on.
[00:39.710 --> 00:42.130]  Let me unfold my stuff here.
[00:42.130 --> 00:43.530]  I'm going to pour this mic instead.
[00:44.090 --> 00:48.730]  Um, that's not going to do a whole lot of good because I still have to hold on to it either way.
[00:48.770 --> 00:51.330]  So, appreciate the offer.
[00:51.770 --> 00:57.030]  But, anyway, let me unpack my goodies here.
[00:58.050 --> 01:00.470]  Oh, we have that goodie, we have that one.
[01:00.690 --> 01:01.290]  What's in there?
[01:01.390 --> 01:02.330]  That's in there.
[01:02.710 --> 01:03.190]  Okay.
[01:09.520 --> 01:11.560]  Uh, that should go.
[01:11.800 --> 01:14.300]  Where can I put this so it'll be logical?
[01:18.500 --> 01:23.300]  Storing this on a computer does not always make sense.
[01:27.270 --> 01:30.190]  Well, I know they aren't all printouts of websites.
[01:30.470 --> 01:32.050]  See, this isn't a printout of a website.
[01:32.050 --> 01:35.690]  This is Arnold Schwarzenegger campaign literature.
[01:36.310 --> 01:46.370]  If there ever, if there ever was a reason to, for ecological reasons, to outlaw junk mail, this is it.
[01:50.630 --> 02:00.150]  There's got to be a way that'll pass legal muster to say if you're going to send unsolicited crap in the mail to somebody, it can only be on a three by five card.
[02:00.310 --> 02:04.550]  And then if they want the whole catalog, they send the card back and get it.
[02:04.630 --> 02:14.890]  Instead of getting all this stuff in the mail that turns trees in my state into, or turns, you know, areas in my state that used to have trees on them into moonscapes and everything else.
[02:15.090 --> 02:18.330]  This is the only campaign literature I ever saw for Schwarzenegger.
[02:18.390 --> 02:20.650]  And look what thick reading it is, too.
[02:21.630 --> 02:24.230]  I want to be the people's governor.
[02:26.170 --> 02:33.030]  I will work honestly without fear or favor to do what is right for the people of California.
[02:36.600 --> 02:41.880]  I am willing for governor to end business as usual in California.
[02:43.460 --> 02:46.180]  Let's bring California back.
[02:46.180 --> 02:47.700]  What does that mean?
[02:49.760 --> 02:51.280]  Yeah, exactly.
[02:51.840 --> 02:57.640]  And what are some of his... Oh, fiscally conservative government with Republican principles.
[02:58.360 --> 03:00.060]  Republican principles.
[03:01.120 --> 03:03.460]  Oxymoron, if I've ever heard one.
[03:04.480 --> 03:09.500]  Repeated outrageous car tax increase, which I got a $3 refund for.
[03:10.020 --> 03:13.100]  Basically, this wasn't a recall election.
[03:13.100 --> 03:14.440]  It was a coup.
[03:14.440 --> 03:20.380]  And granted, the governor before that, Gray Davis, was not a very sympathetic figure.
[03:20.580 --> 03:24.220]  Kind of the East Bay Ray of politics, if you will.
[03:26.020 --> 03:36.740]  A right-wing corporate Clinton-oid Democrat who was, you know, like typical Democrats of today, was more interested in making deals than being a leader.
[03:37.180 --> 03:39.600]  And eventually, it caught up with him.
[03:39.700 --> 03:41.120]  And now they've got him in.
[03:41.120 --> 03:42.960]  This was very important for two reasons.
[03:43.200 --> 03:51.040]  Now Bush has a new state to cheat in this fall, because they might be watching Florida a little more closely.
[03:52.060 --> 04:09.120]  And the old governor, Davis, and the lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamante, had filed a $9 billion lawsuit against Enron and Kenneth Lay for ripping off our state in the corporate-staged energy crisis.
[04:09.600 --> 04:17.580]  But since the state attorney general's office didn't file it and the governor did, the governor can withdraw the lawsuit at his pleasure.
[04:17.880 --> 04:37.000]  And so, as soon as Schwarzenegger got in, and he had been meeting behind closed doors with people like Kenneth Lay, Michael Milken, and others, before the recall ever got started, you know, all you gotta do to save $9 billion in pirate booty is pay a few tens of millions and change the governor.
[04:37.360 --> 04:38.780]  And that's what they did.
[04:39.060 --> 04:46.360]  Schwarzenegger quietly settled with Enron out of court for nothing, as far as I know.
[04:46.620 --> 04:51.380]  That's the real reason he's in, is business as usual in California.
[04:51.380 --> 04:55.000]  More junk mail recently appeared.
[04:55.420 --> 05:12.140]  This one says, Dear friend crossed out in machine-marking Jello, will you become one of the first to join the Bush-Cheney team as a charter member of California?
[05:12.860 --> 05:16.660]  I would be thrilled to tell the president you were with us.
[05:16.660 --> 05:23.620]  So thrilled, we even have a fake autographed photo addressed personally to me.
[05:23.900 --> 05:28.280]  Thank you for your early commitment and dedication as a charter member of the Campaign California.
[05:29.080 --> 05:38.740]  Grassroots leaders like you are the key to building a winning team to win back our country from this fascist cowboy, basically.
[05:46.880 --> 05:58.640]  Anyway, imagine, you know, you talk about everything's gotta be on websites, everything's gotta be downloaded, and what happens if the whole thing crashes or disappears?
[05:58.880 --> 06:08.500]  I had somebody who spent years writing two film scripts or his life's work, only had it on a hard drive, guess what got stolen out of his car?
[06:08.700 --> 06:10.880]  And he didn't have backup copies.
[06:11.160 --> 06:24.480]  I mean, cyber-terrorism is a legitimate fear at times, so if you don't want to lose something that's important to you, back it up on something other than just the digital netherworld and all.
[06:24.560 --> 06:25.720]  You could regret it later.
[06:26.200 --> 06:32.260]  But I am touched with the nostalgic packaging this time around.
[06:32.260 --> 06:39.660]  We have 1984 over here, and I even got one of these little perforated cards.
[06:39.660 --> 06:58.760]  I never thought I'd see one of those again, reminding me of those good old ha-ha days in high school when I was called into the counselor's office and told it was time to plan my career and to fill out a little multiple-choice form of what my interests and skills were,
[06:59.120 --> 07:02.220]  which I filled out, you know, honestly, best of my ability.
[07:02.460 --> 07:08.320]  And a while later, one of these cards came back that only counselors could read, apparently.
[07:08.320 --> 07:15.840]  And it said I should spend my high school years preparing to become a dental hygiene assistant.
[07:18.160 --> 07:23.360]  Imagine how often I visited that counselor in the future and all.
[07:23.620 --> 07:33.960]  When I first came here in 2000, things were so comparatively innocent compared to what we have now.
[07:33.960 --> 07:52.580]  All you had to worry about was getting your hand slapped or fined for the most part of illegally supposedly sharing software, downloading music, ring around the Rosie with ha-ha-ha, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man, and freeing Kevin Mitnick.
[07:53.500 --> 07:54.700]  Not anymore.
[07:55.600 --> 07:58.780]  Many more Kevin Mitnicks in jail now.
[07:59.380 --> 08:04.880]  And I don't mean to downgrade what happened to him, which never should have happened in any way.
[08:05.100 --> 08:06.840]  But now what have we got?
[08:07.020 --> 08:15.580]  But, you know, there's almost a thousand people being held without bail, without trial, can't talk to a lawyer and their family.
[08:15.580 --> 08:21.800]  Now that we've gone into the concentration camp business in Guantanamo Bay.
[08:22.240 --> 08:27.040]  Another 10,000 held incommunicado in Iraq.
[08:27.480 --> 08:30.860]  And we've heard how some of them have been treated.
[08:31.560 --> 08:49.140]  And another 700 plus still being held without trial or without a hearing in this country, who were rounded up after September 11th, and they just threw away the key, locking them up just in case they might be a terrorist.
[08:49.460 --> 08:53.720]  If they get away with this now, who do they come...
[08:53.720 --> 08:55.180]  I should gesture this way, shouldn't I?
[08:55.420 --> 08:57.720]  Who do they come for next?
[08:58.760 --> 09:05.200]  A couple days ago, we hit the thousand mark in dead Americans killed in Iraq.
[09:05.200 --> 09:16.500]  But, of course, in our happy news for happy people with happy problems on TV, they don't mention that we've killed somewhere around 20,000 or more Iraqis.
[09:16.860 --> 09:23.500]  Not to mention the death toll from the sanctions we had on that country from Gulf War No.
[09:23.640 --> 09:25.760]  1 until we went in again.
[09:26.120 --> 09:33.060]  Starving people, depriving them of medicine, so children were dying of as easily preventable diseases as diarrhea.
[09:33.060 --> 09:40.460]  estimated death toll from those sanctions between 1 and 2 million people.
[09:41.020 --> 09:43.040]  That's not fighting terrorism.
[09:43.040 --> 09:44.680]  That's not liberating anybody.
[09:44.860 --> 09:45.720]  That is genocide.
[09:46.240 --> 09:50.880]  And that's how people view us in that part of the world.
[09:52.540 --> 10:01.140]  And another thing they don't bother to tell you is, okay, we only lost 1,000 guys, and look how we kicked their ass over there.
[10:01.740 --> 10:09.600]  Last March, the Pentagon released some figures on how many troops have been sent home for injury or illness.
[10:11.880 --> 10:13.160]  29,000.
[10:13.160 --> 10:21.640]  And this is not people who just got grazed by a stray bullet that broke the skin or got the sniffles or something.
[10:21.940 --> 10:27.000]  These are people who've had their arms or their legs blown off.
[10:27.380 --> 10:39.740]  The Kevlar will kind of protect you from bullets but not roadside bombs when there's no armor put on the Humvees in the first place because they had to save money for B-2 bombers and everything instead.
[10:40.640 --> 10:44.960]  People who may never walk again because they have spinal injuries.
[10:45.480 --> 10:46.420]  Things like that.
[10:46.420 --> 10:54.180]  The illness they're talking about, in all likelihood, is the latest mutation of Gulf War Syndrome.
[10:54.960 --> 10:57.520]  You know, and what helps cause Gulf War Syndrome?
[10:58.160 --> 11:06.620]  Remember John Ashcrack in one of his many, the sky is falling, terrorists are going to attack us all summer, that never seems to happen.
[11:06.920 --> 11:10.980]  He claimed that they were going to blow up dirty bombs.
[11:11.260 --> 11:19.460]  Meaning get a regular bomb, coat it with radioactive material, blow it up in a crowded area like this and kill thousands of people through radiation poisoning.
[11:19.980 --> 11:22.860]  Guess who's using dirty bombs right now?
[11:23.500 --> 11:24.680]  We are!
[11:25.040 --> 11:26.100]  In Iraq!
[11:27.140 --> 11:29.980]  Shells coated with depleted uranium.
[11:30.700 --> 11:34.000]  And sure, they'll go through the armor of a tank and blow it up from the inside.
[11:34.320 --> 11:35.660]  But what have you got left over?
[11:37.340 --> 11:37.940]  Radiation!
[11:39.020 --> 11:44.180]  We left 40 tons of depleted uranium behind in Gulf War 1.
[11:44.180 --> 11:49.680]  Which may explain why the cancer rate in southern Iraq then went up 700%.
[11:50.740 --> 11:52.860]  We used it in Kosovo, too.
[11:53.340 --> 11:54.920]  Hey, Kosovars, come on back.
[11:55.120 --> 11:57.320]  We got rid of Milosevic and all his butchers.
[11:57.480 --> 12:00.000]  And see, we left your land happily aglow.
[12:01.860 --> 12:04.040]  And yes, we're using it this time.
[12:04.580 --> 12:11.100]  And you know how many people are now living on disability from the first Gulf War in this country?
[12:14.260 --> 12:15.620]  236,000.
[12:16.340 --> 12:30.120]  So if you know anybody who you care about who's in the military or thinking of joining, now might be a real good time to do whatever it takes to talk them into not joining or not going over there.
[12:35.130 --> 12:50.290]  Six months in the brig ain't half as bad as living the rest of your life with splitting headaches, double vision, got the shakes all the time, your brain plays tricks on you, can't work anymore, kids being born with cancer and stuff like that.
[12:50.290 --> 12:54.490]  There is a price our soldiers are paying over there.
[12:54.850 --> 13:00.750]  Of course, the USA PATRIOT Act is still with us.
[13:01.270 --> 13:08.130]  And once those kind of laws get on the books, they seem to be very hard to get rid of.
[13:08.630 --> 13:16.190]  Notice how upfront John Kerry has not been about repealing the PATRIOT Act.
[13:16.190 --> 13:45.010]  And some of you may recall the total information awareness proposal, bringing Larry Ellison's wet dream to fruition where they would hire a company called Choice Point, the same ones who helped rig the election in Florida, to try and interface all the little private databases on everybody that the credit card companies and the insurance companies and the government have out of one big file and
[13:45.010 --> 13:47.150]  know everything about you.
[13:48.050 --> 13:53.730]  And that idea got torpedoed for now, but expect to see that again.
[13:54.350 --> 14:03.290]  Ironically, the one they wanted to put in charge of it was John Poindexter, who should still be in jail for his Contragate crimes.
[14:03.630 --> 14:13.890]  Ali North's right-hand man and all the drug-running assassinations, and our terrorists, called the Contras, killing 30,000 people in Nicaragua.
[14:14.170 --> 14:15.590]  Thought we'd bring him back.
[14:15.890 --> 14:26.430]  And then, I guess there's been panels on this, too, about uses and abuses of the smart cards that are already coming in in Europe.
[14:26.810 --> 14:56.730]  And one person, who many people in this room may think is kind of a hip guy, proposed in March 2002, requiring all manufacturers of computers to include an ID card reader, so that in order to log on at all, you'd have to put your smart card in, and then whatever you did would all be known and recorded by the people who issue the smart cards.
[14:56.990 --> 15:02.490]  He said in this talk, quote, privacy is the new urban myth.
[15:02.910 --> 15:04.550]  Guess who said that?
[15:05.210 --> 15:06.810]  Howard Dean.
[15:07.790 --> 15:08.590]  Yeah.
[15:08.970 --> 15:09.730]  Yeah.
[15:10.550 --> 15:33.590]  Meanwhile, our buddy's Choice Point, also now sell at Walmart for $39.77, a little spy-in-a-box kit called Background Check, which is software where you can tap into Choice Point's online database and look up all the dirt on anybody you want.
[15:33.890 --> 15:35.370]  Don't have to wait for Poindexter.
[15:35.870 --> 15:37.210]  You can do it yourself.
[15:38.410 --> 15:51.570]  Last June 4th, Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI, proposed a new domestic spy agency within the FBI to function as a domestic CIA.
[15:52.410 --> 15:54.190]  Restrictions, zero.
[15:54.650 --> 15:59.450]  In other words, basically legalizing what they already do illegally anyway.
[16:00.290 --> 16:07.350]  Another one that's supposed to come into effect this month, but I haven't heard whether it actually has yet, so I'm doubting it.
[16:07.550 --> 16:09.030]  You heard of CAPS, too?
[16:09.830 --> 16:24.050]  Another one of ash cracks, little things of having everybody wants to get on a plane, have to submit to all these background checks, which of course they can then all give to Choice Point or whatever, and decide whether or not you're even allowed to fly on a plane at all.
[16:24.490 --> 16:25.830]  Green, you're okay.
[16:26.450 --> 16:31.670]  Yellow, eh, give them the third degree at the airport every single time.
[16:31.670 --> 16:35.070]  Red, you will never get on a plane again.
[16:35.650 --> 16:37.710]  Who might be red flagged?
[16:37.790 --> 16:43.470]  Well, not a real efficient way to find terrorists who can forge IDs at will anyway.
[16:44.170 --> 16:55.690]  But, one of the people who got red flagged about a year and a half ago and was not allowed to fly from any airport in North Carolina, much to his surprise, was Doug Stuber.
[16:56.390 --> 17:00.690]  His crime being head of the North Carolina Green Party.
[17:01.510 --> 17:14.330]  And Stuber reported that the Homeland Security people even brought out a big old notebook of suspected terrorist organizations, and there on the same page, in alphabetical order, were Al-Qaeda and Green Party.
[17:15.470 --> 17:15.950]  Yeah.
[17:16.450 --> 17:20.150]  I mean, that hasn't been used wisely yet, but give them time.
[17:20.450 --> 17:24.150]  I mean, with caps, too, even the information is not that interesting to them.
[17:24.150 --> 17:25.190]  They've already got that anyway.
[17:25.790 --> 17:31.390]  It's the submission and acceptance of being spied on that interests them the most.
[17:38.140 --> 17:42.020]  Digital Millennium Copyright Act is still with us.
[17:42.280 --> 17:47.960]  You never heard Kerry or Howard Dean even mentioning the existence of that, let alone what should be done with it.
[17:47.960 --> 18:03.560]  And on top of that, I don't know the status of it right today, but Senator Yole, your friend and mine, Senator Orrin Hatch, noted recording artist of 16 CD albums, by the way.
[18:03.780 --> 18:04.540]  Of what?
[18:04.540 --> 18:06.180]  I'm scared to guess.
[18:06.820 --> 18:13.080]  Apparently Ashcroft made a religious album years ago, too, but I've never seen one in a thrift store or anything.
[18:13.780 --> 18:21.860]  And Ashcrack also wrote his own patriotic anthem after September 11th, which so far I've only been able to get 30 seconds of.
[18:22.060 --> 18:26.100]  But there he is on CNN in front of the Justice Department podium.
[18:26.520 --> 18:29.880]  Let the ego soar!
[18:32.820 --> 18:35.580]  And let the ego soar it was.
[18:35.580 --> 18:50.020]  As in a rare nod to affirmative action, he called Latino high-ups in the Justice Department into his office and asked them to translate it into Spanish and has people sing it with him before he begins each day of work.
[18:50.160 --> 18:54.720]  Whether this is before or after the Pentecostal prayers, I don't know.
[18:55.620 --> 18:58.220]  I mean, Ashcrack is so out there.
[18:58.360 --> 19:00.600]  I mean, he's practically Taliban material.
[19:00.600 --> 19:07.660]  As many of you probably know, covering up one big metal titty and a statue at the Justice Department with a curtain and everything.
[19:09.200 --> 19:16.560]  For some, you know, Ashcroftian Pentecostal ritual, I mean, he's from Springfield, Missouri, right?
[19:16.800 --> 19:21.540]  Who only legalized high school dancing in the late 80s and only under court order.
[19:24.620 --> 19:29.560]  Anyway, Ashcrack, before he takes any oath of office, he covers himself in cooking oil.
[19:30.800 --> 19:34.820]  Too bad nobody brings a match or anything, but...
[19:38.060 --> 19:58.180]  Anyway, Orrin Hatch is trying to get Senate to fast-track and quickly pass the Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act, outlawing even the construction or possession of any device that might be used to infringe upon corporate copyrighted material.
[19:58.540 --> 20:01.880]  In other words, CD burners, illegal.
[20:02.820 --> 20:05.400]  Peer-to-peer networks, illegal.
[20:06.540 --> 20:08.340]  iPods, illegal.
[20:09.440 --> 20:15.480]  Surely Mr. Wozniak and the others have enough money they can fight this, but we shall see.
[20:15.900 --> 20:29.900]  I mean, some people say, oh yeah, we can always circumvent around that anyway, and it'll just create a huge black market, kind of like drugs or beer you had to hide from Elliot Ness, or he'd machine gun you on the untouchables and everything.
[20:31.400 --> 20:39.280]  But, a black market in order to break an unjust law, that hasn't really gotten rid of the marijuana laws yet, has it?
[20:39.600 --> 20:46.720]  So we don't want to see the Inducement Act passed, and they're also trying to sneak it in to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.
[20:47.100 --> 20:48.280]  You know what that is?
[20:48.420 --> 20:49.980]  You know, like, NAFTA on crack.
[20:49.980 --> 20:55.580]  It extends all the worst stuff of that to the rest of South and Central America and the Caribbean.
[20:55.940 --> 21:00.760]  Only Cuba is exempt, so we're doing a Castro a huge favor on this one.
[21:00.940 --> 21:19.480]  It basically says that corporations have the same right as sovereign nations and are equally powerful, and can go to the FTAA commission and try and wipe out any other country's law that they say interferes with their right to profit, and shake down a country,
[21:19.500 --> 21:37.180]  no matter how poor they are, for blood money, for things like failure to privatize schools, failure to hand over the electricity grid, failure to let Clear Channel eat up all the radio stations, failure to let Rupert Murdoch, or somebody worse, eat up all the newspapers,
[21:37.380 --> 21:37.620]  etc.
[21:37.620 --> 21:44.440]  And the FTAA is supposed to have the equivalent of the INDUCE Act in there as well.
[21:46.100 --> 22:00.640]  And, as the digital world takes over the workplace, it has constantly been abused and turned into an electronic plantation, and now a new trendy term that's come in in the last few months, off-shoring.
[22:00.640 --> 22:05.640]  It doesn't, isn't it great when stocks go up when a company off-shores?
[22:05.940 --> 22:19.820]  Which means, of course, they take your job and ship it to India or wherever, and many companies even require the people they're about to fire to train the new employees before they're fired.
[22:19.820 --> 22:33.920]  And, I'm glad to see since I came here four years ago, there's been a growing interest and respect for hacktivism, as opposed to just hacking for recreation.
[22:39.900 --> 22:49.410]  But one of the big dangers we face in this upcoming so-called election is hacktivism from the other side.
[22:49.930 --> 23:08.530]  Way worse than the hacktivism already done by Choice Point in Florida, detailed in a book called The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast, where they purged all these supposed convicted felons, meaning those Negro voters who might vote for Gore,
[23:08.970 --> 23:10.290]  off the voter rolls.
[23:10.630 --> 23:13.170]  Jeb and Katherine Harris were both in on this.
[23:13.170 --> 23:21.510]  And then Palast actually looked at the printouts and whatnot in the database of what Choice Point was up to, and they had all these people convicted of...
[23:21.510 --> 23:23.930]  you know, it said convicted of a felony in 2004.
[23:24.870 --> 23:27.290]  Convicted of a felony in 2007.
[23:28.050 --> 23:36.110]  And he claims he offered this information to the Gore campaign three weeks before the regular election, and they turned it down.
[23:36.350 --> 23:45.670]  And even afterwards, when people were up in arms over tens of thousands of people not allowed to vote because they were black in Florida, where was Al Gore?
[23:46.630 --> 23:53.310]  One of many... was he that allergic to being photographed with civil rights leaders of a different skin color, or what?
[23:53.850 --> 24:01.810]  I mean, you know, for anybody who says Nader cost Gore the election, well, there's one of many reasons Gore cost himself that election.
[24:01.810 --> 24:03.570]  But other people...
[24:07.750 --> 24:27.450]  Other people involved in some heavy-duty hacktivism, trying to go national with electronic voting, which of course is easily altered and rigged, especially when there's no paper trail, is a company called Diebold, out of Ohio, whose head, Wally O'Dell,
[24:27.750 --> 24:33.150]  even came right out and said, quote, I will deliver Ohio for George W.
[24:33.450 --> 24:33.610]  Bush.
[24:34.270 --> 24:35.330]  Guess how?
[24:35.930 --> 24:44.330]  Well, maybe the same thing that happened in Boone City, Indiana, where they got one of these electronic voting gizmos to be all modern.
[24:44.610 --> 24:47.410]  And sure enough, amazing statistics.
[24:47.690 --> 24:55.070]  It reported 144,000 people voted in a place that had only 19,000 registered voters.
[24:55.070 --> 25:18.810]  And for anybody who posts anything questioning whether Diebold's machines work properly or are even intended to work properly, Diebold has been sending out cease and desist letters to net service providers for publishing any of the internal documents showing that their machines might screw up once in a while.
[25:19.630 --> 25:27.910]  Head of the FCC is Michael Powell, the baby Doc Duvalier of the broadcast world.
[25:28.130 --> 25:34.030]  Only reason he got that job is because he's Colin Powell's fat, pasty, doughboy-looking son.
[25:35.570 --> 25:41.690]  And he has said, he has called the broadcast industry under-monopolized.
[25:42.150 --> 25:46.150]  And said he, quote, has no idea what the public interest is.
[25:46.150 --> 26:07.710]  No wonder he was trying to ram through more laws getting rid of important regulations about media monopoly to allow people like Clear Channel and Fox and Mickey Mouse to swallow up more and more of the outlets we are exposed to that most people believe the information they get on it And,
[26:07.710 --> 26:20.570]  you know, don't really realize what's going on when all the local programming, community affairs programs, and talk shows anywhere to the left of Michael Savage are mysteriously removed from the airwaves.
[26:20.810 --> 26:23.410]  You know, that's Powell's part of the job.
[26:23.590 --> 26:30.650]  Those who rule information and can control it have a much better chance of controlling the world.
[26:31.310 --> 26:36.630]  And there's other smaller ways they're systematically trying to shut off our access to information.
[26:37.110 --> 26:50.930]  Even in San Francisco, now that a 36-year-old yuppie scum named Gavin Newsom is the mayor, who grew up in the Getty Mansion and his whole platform was, I hate homeless people, vote for me.
[26:51.270 --> 26:56.570]  He barely won, by the way, even though he was supposed to win in a walk, but hopefully I'll have time to get to that later.
[26:56.570 --> 27:10.010]  Anyway, even though he did the right thing on gay marriage after holding his finger to the wind and saying, hmm, which is more likely to make me president later, and decided he'd allow it, Newsom overall has been poisonous.
[27:10.350 --> 27:13.130]  You know, evictions going way, way up again.
[27:13.290 --> 27:24.570]  And also, suddenly people are getting busted and fined huge amounts of money for putting up flyers on telephone poles or anywhere else.
[27:24.570 --> 27:36.670]  And at the same time, they're trying to get rid of newspaper vending machines and require them all to be put in these special machines they call ped mounts, built by the J.C.
[27:36.790 --> 27:42.330]  Deco company in France, where there's only, say, six slots, if that.
[27:42.530 --> 27:46.690]  And if you're the seventh paper on the block, people don't have access to you anymore.
[27:46.690 --> 27:52.790]  And on the back of the ped mounts, billboard space, controlled by guess who?
[27:53.370 --> 27:54.710]  Clear Channel.
[27:55.610 --> 27:55.810]  Clear Channel.
[27:55.810 --> 27:57.330]  Handed it to them for free.
[27:57.810 --> 28:11.510]  Another way of restricting our access to information as a way of deliberately dumbing down society to create more people who will fall for things like this.
[28:11.510 --> 28:23.250]  And basically, it could create a society of paranoid, reactionary, angry, hummerheads who actually believe what they see on Fox News.
[28:23.590 --> 28:29.790]  You know, not just obedient, but militantly stupid, shall we say.
[28:36.510 --> 28:45.510]  You know, this isn't capitalism anymore with so-called free trade and revolving door between corporations, Pentagon, and other government positions.
[28:45.510 --> 28:47.450]  This is feudalism.
[28:47.670 --> 28:49.150]  This ain't saying capitalism.
[28:49.390 --> 28:50.350]  This is feudalism.
[28:50.750 --> 29:00.610]  Barons and lords and high castles have names like Boeing, Exxon, Microsoft, Oracle, Warner Brothers, McDonald's.
[29:00.750 --> 29:06.650]  And every time we go out and give any of them money for anything, we are their serfs.
[29:07.290 --> 29:10.490]  A little hard to escape that completely.
[29:12.190 --> 29:21.850]  But it's getting to the point where corporations not only get to write the laws and make the laws, they get to enforce them themselves, too.
[29:22.390 --> 29:39.210]  Not just through phony free trade agreements, but your friends and mine, the RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America, becoming more and more of their own enforcement arm, blurring where big business ends and government begins.
[29:39.370 --> 30:01.870]  According to the LA Weekly, their anti-piracy unit, the APU in Los Angeles has been dressing up to look like police and terrorizing street corner vendors in Latino neighborhoods, seizing their discs and getting photo IDs of them to get their file going.
[30:02.910 --> 30:08.010]  And, you know, admittedly... well, I'm going to skip that part for now, but...
[30:08.010 --> 30:18.630]  And the RIAA as well, somehow they have the right now to sue thousands of people at random for failure to buy enough of their products.
[30:18.630 --> 30:23.170]  Imagine if Kellogg's got this power or something, too.
[30:23.930 --> 30:29.370]  Twelve-year-old girl in the projects in this town sued for file sharing.
[30:29.990 --> 30:36.210]  Seventy-one-year-old Durwood Pickle in Texas sued for file sharing.
[30:36.210 --> 30:51.070]  And now, the normally supposed liberal John Conyers and Howard Berman in Congress are proposing a bill that says if you trade as much as one music file, it's a felony that lands you five years in prison.
[30:51.670 --> 30:56.410]  And they justify that by saying, well, each file is a theft of $250.
[30:57.890 --> 30:58.570]  Right.
[30:59.510 --> 31:05.970]  Australia, two guys have already gotten 18-month jail terms for file sharing.
[31:06.290 --> 31:13.010]  They were both suspended this time to make an example out of them, but that doesn't make me feel too comfortable either.
[31:13.350 --> 31:34.210]  All this in spite of a new study from people at Harvard and University of North Carolina, who tracked 680 albums over 17 weeks in late 2002, and concluded that overall file sharing increases CD sales for anything that was already sold over 600,000 copies.
[31:35.290 --> 31:54.150]  But... and they said that they made their model for how much file sharing would really cost anything and would say a total of $2 million in lost sales, while the major labels, or CD sales in general, from 2000 to 2002, fell 139 million units.
[31:54.290 --> 31:59.490]  Maybe because they put out too much crap, and because of the Bush economy...
[32:04.500 --> 32:17.680]  And because of the Bush economy, people don't have the kind of disposable income they used to have, especially to buy an album with only one good song on it and a lot of fluff or whatever.
[32:17.680 --> 32:27.600]  Of course, under 600,000 copies, or in the case of my little label, generally under 6,000, we have been hurt a lot more.
[32:27.600 --> 32:31.420]  I was hoping we would bounce back up again, too, like we did with Napster.
[32:31.640 --> 32:33.700]  But that hasn't happened.
[32:33.800 --> 32:41.840]  And it's getting harder and harder to sell an unknown band and break 1,000 copies and break even on the damn thing.
[32:42.340 --> 32:45.900]  Some, but not all of that, is because of file sharing.
[32:45.900 --> 32:59.260]  So I ask again, you know, for the smaller artists, please support the people, who are basically a lot of them paying out of their own pocket to make their dream come true, and make a few copies of their album.
[32:59.380 --> 33:01.840]  And if they can't get rid of them, they may not make another one.
[33:07.540 --> 33:19.660]  A lot of the bands on alternative tentacles, the newer ones, and we're one of the few labels left who will take chances on unknown bands instead of dig up an old punk rock band and try and recycle it again and again and again.
[33:19.860 --> 33:22.900]  I mean, we put out some old stuff, too, but I like to put out new stuff.
[33:22.900 --> 33:33.360]  And the bands break up a lot quicker than they used to, in part because they ain't got any money to buy food or gas for the van and get frustrated and all.
[33:33.580 --> 33:41.340]  And I'm not saying everybody should automatically buy into the rock star dream and expect a swimming pool or a free bus or something.
[33:41.340 --> 33:54.400]  But the first time I brought this up when I was first here, somebody later came up to me and lectured me that it was politically incorrect for an artist to ever want any kind of money for their work of any kind.
[33:55.000 --> 33:58.260]  I have a two-word reply for that.
[33:58.660 --> 33:59.880]  F*ck you.
[34:06.310 --> 34:12.890]  It's weird that some of these people who feel that way are the same ones who say that laborers don't get paid enough.
[34:12.890 --> 34:15.910]  But we shouldn't get paid at all.
[34:16.230 --> 34:25.210]  I mean, I'm not asking for showers of money just to be able to pay the bills so I don't wind up working at McDonald's or Siebel or whatever.
[34:26.210 --> 34:27.710]  So, I mean, that's all I'm saying.
[34:27.850 --> 34:33.830]  Meanwhile, the major labels claim, because of all this wicked file sharing, we're going broke!
[34:34.170 --> 34:35.610]  We're going broke!
[34:35.970 --> 34:41.490]  To which I can only quote a famous flipper song and say, Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
[34:41.750 --> 34:43.030]  Ho ho ho ho ho ho!
[34:43.410 --> 34:45.110]  Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee!
[34:45.230 --> 34:51.990]  Well, if you really think they're going broke, take a look at any issue you care to of Billboard magazine.
[34:52.630 --> 34:58.710]  The ones that... you know, this is kind of their Bible of sell, sell, sell, sell, sell and everything.
[34:59.090 --> 35:01.070]  Here's the Billboard Top 200.
[35:01.430 --> 35:02.330]  What have we got?
[35:02.550 --> 35:06.830]  Top one in this week is Outkast, 7 million copies sold.
[35:06.830 --> 35:11.170]  They have a circle there for everything that's gone gold and sold half a million.
[35:11.390 --> 35:14.930]  A triangle for everything that's gone platinum and sold over a million.
[35:15.470 --> 35:19.610]  And almost everything in the Top 200 has at least a circle and most of them have triangles.
[35:20.170 --> 35:23.530]  Some of these are like 10 million copies sold.
[35:23.850 --> 35:26.930]  Nora Jones, 8 million copies sold.
[35:27.370 --> 35:31.510]  Eagles, even now in a repackaging, 2 million copies sold.
[35:31.510 --> 35:36.610]  And for some weird reason, 2 million Americans bought a new Rod Stewart album.
[35:39.250 --> 35:44.570]  The point being, they're not going broke at all.
[35:44.790 --> 35:50.490]  They're just a little worried about cutting executives' mega million dollar salaries or something.
[35:50.610 --> 35:52.410]  They ain't gonna hear of that.
[35:52.410 --> 36:01.370]  And, how many of you know that when the major labels do swipe money through suing a file share or whatever, the artists don't get a damn thing.
[36:01.850 --> 36:04.910]  They're just pocketing it away for themselves.
[36:05.690 --> 36:14.550]  Major labels recently had to settle with several states for price-fixing for somewhere around, what was it, was it 30 or 50 million bucks?
[36:15.250 --> 36:18.050]  Rather than fight it, they just agreed to settle.
[36:18.170 --> 36:19.810]  They knew they were ripping everybody off.
[36:19.810 --> 36:30.730]  And then, they settled again out of court with some artists for deliberately underpaying their royalties, again to the tune of about 30 million dollars.
[36:31.070 --> 36:34.050]  The excuse being, we lost their addresses.
[36:35.070 --> 36:37.610]  The addresses of Dolly Parton.
[36:37.930 --> 36:42.410]  The addresses of Puffy Combs, too.
[36:43.370 --> 36:45.190]  He weirds me out.
[36:46.630 --> 37:00.690]  Now, why would anybody take the time for press releases and arranging everything to change their name in mid-career from Puff Daddy to Pee Diddy?
[37:01.430 --> 37:04.970]  Can somebody please explain this to me?
[37:05.330 --> 37:09.410]  I mean, is this a diaper fetishist code thing for peeing in your diddies?
[37:09.470 --> 37:10.610]  I have no idea.
[37:11.890 --> 37:27.210]  Major labels are also demanding that online radio broadcasters encrypt their broadcasts so nobody can record stuff off the radio, which they've been trying to find a way to do for 40 or 50 years and failed.
[37:27.450 --> 37:37.530]  But this also restricts access to information because you can't record documentaries or news programs or anything anymore that way either.
[37:37.530 --> 37:46.110]  These are the same people who, in 1984, sued Sony to block the sales of VCR machines.
[37:46.510 --> 37:57.630]  The same ones who went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1908 to ban player piano rolls because they thought it was infringing on their copyrights.
[37:57.730 --> 38:04.670]  Maybe they tried to stop the phonograph record in the 19th century because it might interfere with sales of sheet music.
[38:05.370 --> 38:11.390]  And like Ashcrack, these are the same people who say they want to get government off our backs.
[38:11.890 --> 38:14.990]  Unless, of course, it interferes with money they want to make.
[38:15.370 --> 38:21.310]  And speaking of getting government off our backs, anybody planning to go to the Republican National Convention?
[38:25.070 --> 38:28.830]  That's going to be an interesting one, isn't it?
[38:29.000 --> 38:39.730]  I mean, some people are hoping for a million people in the streets just saying this to the Bush administration and everything they stand for.
[38:44.360 --> 38:47.340]  You'd think some of these cities would learn by now.
[38:47.340 --> 38:53.240]  Eminem coming to town, Marilyn Manson, Glenn Danzig, no problem.
[38:53.660 --> 38:59.060]  Bush comes to town, call out every reserve cop from a 500-mile radius.
[38:59.080 --> 39:02.820]  There's going to be trouble with the fans and all.
[39:03.500 --> 39:15.600]  I mean, the biggest danger, I think, aside from incredible police violence, is making sure that the word gets out that it even happened.
[39:16.400 --> 39:30.360]  Making sure that the word gets out to people who normally would only watch CNN or Fox or NBC that there were this many people protesting in the first place.
[39:30.620 --> 39:35.100]  Because the other side, since Seattle, has gotten a little smarter too, haven't they?
[39:35.100 --> 39:48.160]  How many of you even know that a year or so, two years, a year and a half after Seattle, an even bigger group, 70,000 people, swarmed on the Free Trade of the Americas conference in Quebec City, in Canada?
[39:52.480 --> 40:02.660]  But ask almost anybody at random, you know, if they ever heard that happen, most people will say no, let alone that one of the great Bush quotes happened during that too.
[40:02.960 --> 40:05.180]  No, no, no, there's not going to be a press conference today.
[40:05.180 --> 40:07.920]  Not in English, not in French, not in Mexican.
[40:11.050 --> 40:11.710]  Yeah.
[40:12.610 --> 40:20.770]  Another thing they do now is arrest the protest leaders ahead of time, no matter what they've done.
[40:21.010 --> 40:31.730]  In Washington, D.C., before one of the actions against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, they arrested a bunch of people for the crime of puppet-making.
[40:32.430 --> 40:45.210]  In Seattle, they arrested people for possession of gas masks, knowing full well if they ever brought that to court, it would be thrown out, but by the time it went to court, the protests would already have passed on.
[40:45.210 --> 40:47.430]  They do this again and again and again.
[40:48.250 --> 40:52.910]  And my guess is, they're not going to be very nice or civil this time.
[40:52.910 --> 40:58.330]  The NYPD's reputation is, they're not as likely to f*ck with you as they are in L.A.
[40:58.530 --> 41:03.230]  or Philly, but when they do, they really do a good job of it.
[41:03.530 --> 41:08.410]  Just ask Amadou Diallo or Abner Louima or any of them.
[41:12.920 --> 41:32.100]  One of the morals of this story, of course, being, if you do go to the protests or are planning to go, it might be worth scouring the thrift stores now for old sports equipment, like football helmets, hockey helmets, bike helmets, shoulder pads, what have you.
[41:32.280 --> 41:33.800]  You may wind up needing them.
[41:33.880 --> 41:36.400]  The Japanese learned this clear back in the 60s.
[41:36.400 --> 41:38.540]  I noticed the footage of protestors there.
[41:38.700 --> 41:41.000]  Cops wore helmets, they wore helmets.
[41:41.200 --> 41:43.860]  Cops got batons, they got batons.
[41:44.040 --> 41:47.000]  Cops got shields, they got shields.
[41:53.260 --> 42:12.680]  And of course, there's nothing the cops and the corporate media like more than if somebody breaks a window at Starbucks or something and they can quickly call it an anarchist riot on the news and ignore all the labor union people who showed up and everything else.
[42:12.860 --> 42:19.040]  Plus, then the cops can say, oh, riot, let's have our police riot now and beat the crap out of everybody.
[42:19.960 --> 42:27.860]  So if you do see somebody there getting ready to do something stupid, you know, put your arms around them and lock them or whatever.
[42:28.240 --> 42:29.900]  Stop them, basically.
[42:36.610 --> 42:46.850]  What easier way to disguise an undercover cop than to pull a black baklava over their head and have them claim they're part of the black block.
[42:47.970 --> 43:04.950]  It was a little weird in Genova, in the big protests at the G8 summit there a few years ago, the most violent ones to date, that the reports coming in through Indymedia were that the black block people were not only seen conversing with the cops repeatedly,
[43:05.330 --> 43:08.790]  but were never ever beat up or arrested.
[43:09.390 --> 43:11.410]  What does that tell you?
[43:11.710 --> 43:20.170]  You know, I'm not saying that all black block people may be undercover cops any more than every single member of the Weather Underground was undercover cops.
[43:20.170 --> 43:30.490]  just possibly a significant number size of them to screw things up for everybody else unless we stop them and all.
[43:30.810 --> 43:37.310]  So the main point is to get the word out about the protests and why people are really there.
[43:37.450 --> 43:54.230]  That it's not just an anarchist riot, but the reason we're really there is because nobody has shown more disrespect and been more exploitive towards the innocent victims of September 11th than the Bush administration themselves.
[44:00.490 --> 44:05.450]  How many of you feel more secure now that we're occupying Iraq?
[44:07.150 --> 44:16.470]  I mean, statistically, both terrorist attacks and Al-Qaeda attacks have gone way up since we went into Afghanistan.
[44:16.510 --> 44:18.630]  That's how effective this is working.
[44:18.630 --> 44:27.130]  So with all this trumpeting complete with the usual corporate logos on CNN and the other news outlets, hand over on June 30th.
[44:27.250 --> 44:30.290]  The Iraqis have their sovereignty back now.
[44:30.850 --> 44:32.610]  No, they don't.
[44:33.370 --> 44:43.610]  We took out the emperor we installed, the guy who used to work for Henry Kissinger who was a privatization specialist named Paul Bremer, took him out.
[44:43.890 --> 44:56.470]  He got on the plane June 30th to fly home to New Hampshire to, of course, write a cash-in book and get back to what the corporate media said was his real passion in life, teaching gourmet cooking classes.
[44:56.790 --> 44:58.310]  I am touched.
[44:58.530 --> 45:12.830]  But meanwhile, the provisional government now, they must run every single law they want to pass by American generals who have veto power over anything they do, and the U.S.
[45:13.030 --> 45:24.990]  military and any foreign private contractors, including mercenaries, which they call security, are completely exempt from all Iraqi laws.
[45:25.590 --> 45:27.970]  That is not sovereignty.
[45:28.930 --> 45:31.490]  And, you know, did I say this earlier?
[45:31.710 --> 45:32.190]  No, I didn't.
[45:32.250 --> 45:33.170]  Not this time, anyway.
[45:33.590 --> 45:35.930]  You know, we've killed 20,000 of them already.
[45:36.130 --> 45:37.490]  We're occupying their country.
[45:37.910 --> 45:40.550]  Killed millions, possibly, before that.
[45:40.770 --> 45:53.710]  Even if we wind up killing off and squelching every single person who ever supported Saddam Hussein, every Muslim all over the world who's down with Osama Bin Laden, what will their kids be like?
[45:58.850 --> 46:18.170]  Look no further than how young those little boys are throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, suicide bombings and bombings starting to happen even in Madrid, in Turkey, Morocco, Bali, even there is your answer.
[46:18.670 --> 46:24.890]  And another thing that doesn't ever seem to get into corporate news is, guess what, George W.
[46:25.070 --> 46:43.390]  Bush, Dick Cheney, Conda Sleiza Rice, Tony Blair, Paul Wolfowitz, John Ashcrack, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, Bill Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, House Dictator Tom DeLay, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Rambo, Stallone,
[46:43.490 --> 46:44.470]  all have in common?
[46:45.170 --> 46:56.030]  They've all been beating their titties for months and months before we went in to have a new bloodbath in the Middle East, in Iraq, and not a damn one of them has ever served in the military.
[46:57.210 --> 46:58.250]  Not one.
[47:01.330 --> 47:05.050]  This whole war is being run by chicken hawks.
[47:06.210 --> 47:09.250]  Damned if they're going to send their own kids to fight in Iraq.
[47:11.010 --> 47:15.170]  Ironically, the one who came the closest was George W.
[47:15.470 --> 47:23.330]  Bush, because he supposedly showed up for National Guard duty here and there, and now they're saying, oh, well, all the records are lost.
[47:24.030 --> 47:26.550]  Interesting form of hacktivism, if you will.
[47:26.850 --> 47:41.950]  And now that they can't find the 100 to 500 tons of weapons of mass destruction they knew Saddam had, we're saying, well, it was okay to go in and occupy Iraq anyway in the first preemptive war in our history.
[47:41.950 --> 47:43.650]  You know, we have to have a preemptive war.
[47:43.850 --> 47:46.410]  We have to attack them just in case they attack us someday.
[47:46.730 --> 47:53.830]  The same logic Hitler used for invading Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, and the rest.
[47:53.990 --> 47:54.630]  Same thing.
[47:59.080 --> 48:02.740]  Well, it's okay because, look, we liberated Iraq.
[48:02.920 --> 48:07.900]  You know, out of the Saddam frying pan and into the Halliburton oil well fires.
[48:07.900 --> 48:08.380]  Yeah.
[48:08.900 --> 48:13.200]  Well, if that, we, if we, and admittedly, yes, Saddam was a bad motherf*cker.
[48:13.720 --> 48:22.420]  But, does that mean that we now say that it's okay for Canada and Europe and Mexico to invade this country to liberate us from Bush?
[48:29.820 --> 48:31.420]  We may need them.

[00:00.000 --> 00:10.320]  People like Scott Ritter, head of intelligence during the weapons inspections from 91 to 98, said no weapons of mass destruction.
[00:10.740 --> 00:16.700]  Hans Blix, the new U.N. inspector, goes and says, hey, no weapons of mass destruction.
[00:16.960 --> 00:22.360]  To which Dick Cheney told him to his face, we will not hesitate to discredit you.
[00:23.340 --> 00:26.760]  Well, the real intelligence failures may lie elsewhere.
[00:27.720 --> 00:40.220]  Physicians for Social Responsibility got a hold of some documents about a year ago after long litigation against Dick Cheney's energy task force, much of which is still going on.
[00:40.320 --> 00:43.140]  He doesn't want to sign and hand over any of those papers.
[00:43.520 --> 00:48.920]  Bush himself said last April, a country that hides something is a country that is afraid of getting caught.
[00:49.240 --> 00:51.620]  Well, that's why Cheney won't hand over the papers.
[00:51.620 --> 01:04.320]  But what turned up in the papers that Physicians for Social Responsibility did get from the Cheney Energy Task Force, you know, after the California energy crisis that was created in part by Enron turning off the faucet.
[01:04.320 --> 01:28.630]  Anyway, Cheney had, the task force had, a map of Iraqi oil fields, pipelines, terminals, and refineries accompanied by a list of potential buyers once we seized their country, which may explain why they were so asleep at the wheel around September 11th.
[01:28.630 --> 01:36.830]  I mean, this stuff alone is a worse scandal than Watergate, Contragate, and all the Reagan-gates combined, let alone Monica Lewinsky.
[01:37.170 --> 01:42.330]  But with all these scandals, the question is, what did the president know and when did he know it?
[01:42.470 --> 01:46.270]  And the scary part is, in this case, the answer is, nothing.
[01:47.130 --> 01:49.470]  He never knew anything.
[01:49.470 --> 01:53.970]  For intelligence failure, first you need intelligence.
[01:54.470 --> 01:54.910]  Right?
[01:58.240 --> 02:13.500]  And the 9-1-1 hearings and the ones on the intelligence failures, deliberate if you ask me, in Iraq, you know, they've turned up, they basically portray something that's not being run like a White House or something serious, it's more like spinal tap,
[02:13.820 --> 02:14.760]  in a way.
[02:14.760 --> 02:20.360]  August 6th, the memo shows that Condoleezza got kinda lazy.
[02:20.640 --> 02:31.600]  She said, oh yeah, there was no silver bullet here, no smoking gun, but all it said was, Bin Laden is ready to attack the United States in a big, big way.
[02:32.360 --> 02:37.580]  Part of the reason they didn't take it seriously, well, for one thing, Bush was on vacation.
[02:37.580 --> 02:39.020]  Hey, don't mess with Texas.
[02:39.160 --> 02:41.100]  I'm out in Kansas City on vacation down here in Texas.
[02:41.400 --> 02:44.980]  Now hand me that Bible with the dime bag cut out into the pages here.
[02:45.360 --> 02:46.540]  Connie, get me some pretzels.
[02:50.310 --> 03:09.230]  Well, another reason that they were so asleep at the wheel, too, was not just obsession with staging a fake energy crisis and conquering Iraq, but documents show that the main focus of Condoleezza and Rumsfeld, they thought the most important national security concern for us,
[03:09.350 --> 03:14.150]  hell, it's not global warming, it's lack of nuclear weapons in outer space.
[03:14.530 --> 03:21.230]  We must do whatever we can to make Reagan's Star Wars wet dream come true, and put nukes in space.
[03:22.270 --> 03:28.310]  Condoleezza was scheduled to give a speech on September 11th about how desperately we needed nukes in space.
[03:28.310 --> 03:31.150]  And now that speech, of course, is classified.
[03:31.730 --> 03:41.380]  And the problem with those weapons is, I think I said this last time, what happens if they malfunction, nuke a city, and then they retaliate and go after us?
[03:42.930 --> 03:49.310]  Or one of those things comes back down and crashes and blows in the atmosphere like the Columbia did or whatever.
[03:49.710 --> 04:03.910]  If there's a nuclear warhead up there, 40, 50 pounds of plutonium, that's enough plutonium dust to slowly blow all over our atmosphere and cause cancer in just about every breathing critter left on the planet.
[04:04.370 --> 04:10.910]  That scares me a lot more than North Korea, Saddam Hussein, or Al-Qaeda combined.
[04:12.010 --> 04:15.690]  Ash crack was asleep at the wheel for another reason.
[04:15.690 --> 04:28.430]  Lobbying Congress at the time to slash another 600 million dollars from the Justice Department's anti-terrorist efforts because he wanted to concentrate everything on the main threat to life as we know it.
[04:29.850 --> 04:30.570]  Pornography.
[04:31.290 --> 04:35.890]  You ain't gonna let your eagle soar by looking at that pornography.
[04:36.690 --> 04:40.430]  That was the real intelligence failure.
[04:40.790 --> 04:46.590]  And they quietly announced in February of 2002 that Star Wars is on fast track.
[04:47.090 --> 04:54.710]  Now that so many tests have failed, let's just put them up there anyway and hope that they work.
[04:55.370 --> 04:57.830]  That's what I call an intelligence failure.
[04:58.510 --> 05:07.830]  And bravo to the leaders of Germany and France and the other countries who refused to go along with Bush and help invade Iraq.
[05:13.650 --> 05:23.250]  Never did I think I'd have a single good thing to say about Jacques Chirac who in his own country is nicknamed Super Crook, among other things.
[05:23.430 --> 05:25.370]  But this time he did the right thing.
[05:25.670 --> 05:41.570]  But what do you want to bet one of the main reasons these folks did the right thing in this case is because there were so many protesters in the streets in their country urging them not to get caught with their pants down licking Bush this time around.
[05:43.710 --> 05:46.050]  And I forgot what I was going to say.
[05:46.710 --> 06:02.690]  Anyway, you may recall that Colin Powell was the one who drew the short straw and had to walk the plank and go to the United Nations and say that, well, we know there's 100 to 500 tons of weapons of mass destruction.
[06:02.690 --> 06:11.830]  Here's your photographic proof, which to anybody else looked like a blurry aerial photo of a Walmart under construction in the desert somewhere.
[06:12.110 --> 06:13.310]  But this was different.
[06:13.510 --> 06:17.090]  It had words with arrows pointing to various parts of the building.
[06:17.330 --> 06:19.000]  What more proof do you need?
[06:19.570 --> 06:21.070]  A truck on the ground.
[06:21.210 --> 06:23.230]  What does that tell you?
[06:23.230 --> 06:30.830]  And hey, not only that, but I got this information from an unimpeachable source, Tony Blair.
[06:31.270 --> 06:32.770]  Would he lie to you?
[06:33.150 --> 06:38.330]  Well, apparently he did because his top secret information was swiped directly off the net.
[06:38.510 --> 06:54.330]  In another instance of government hacktivism by the powerful against the powerless, where it was a paper put up by somebody at the University of California State University at Monterey, who then went public and said, yo, if the guy had just come and talked to me,
[06:54.510 --> 06:56.630]  I could have given him current information.
[06:56.990 --> 07:01.510]  Those weapons totals in there are from 1991 and all.
[07:01.510 --> 07:13.030]  But no matter, Blair said that Saddam Hussein could strike our shores with nuclear weapons in 45 minutes.
[07:14.130 --> 07:14.970]  Okay.
[07:15.830 --> 07:22.110]  The excuses were getting really creative, artistic even, by then in our country, too.
[07:22.390 --> 07:31.050]  We were saying that Saddam Hussein was hiding all his nuclear weapons and anthrax labs in trucks, driving up and down the pockmarked highways of Iraq.
[07:31.470 --> 07:35.290]  I haven't heard of hiding a nuke lab in a semi since Get Smart.
[07:39.930 --> 07:56.510]  And then we said that, oh, he's building a fleet of unmanned aircraft, drone planes, that could be used for actions targeting the United States, as if somehow a remote control plane could make it into the no-fly zone, across Turkey, across Europe, across the Atlantic,
[07:56.510 --> 07:59.510]  and crash into the Oval Office with nobody noticing.
[07:59.870 --> 08:02.010]  No problem running out of fuel.
[08:02.290 --> 08:15.230]  Well, they did find one drone plane in Iraq, about so big, propeller-powered, fuselage made in part out of balsa wood, held together in part with duct tape.
[08:16.390 --> 08:18.830]  Well, what if Blair's right?
[08:19.210 --> 08:23.470]  Keep your eye on the sky, especially around the time of the Republican Convention.
[08:23.470 --> 08:42.070]  And if you see a propeller plane coming slowly towards you, with a fuselage of balsa wood and a nuclear bomb held on with duct tape, you have 45 minutes to go to any one of zillions of greasy fast food restaurants in this town, cover yourself with Crisco,
[08:42.390 --> 08:46.750]  roll in the cornflake crumbs and say, Okay, Colonel Sanders, I'm ready!
[08:47.030 --> 08:48.190]  Fry me!
[08:54.470 --> 08:59.630]  But, of course, they fell for the nuclear argument, and maybe they thought there was money in it.
[08:59.690 --> 09:00.130]  I don't know.
[09:00.250 --> 09:01.490]  But Congress fell for it.
[09:01.550 --> 09:03.250]  John Kerry fell for it.
[09:03.250 --> 09:22.650]  But I've had trouble personally with photographic proof for many years, especially after I went to the Republican Convention to cause some trouble in Philadelphia in 2000, and detoured into this little exhibit hall that had a feel-good exhibit for all the peasants who couldn't get into the convention.
[09:22.650 --> 09:34.770]  History of conventions passed, with First Lady's footwear under glass, and coffee table books about Bush's dad, and even their dog for sale.
[09:35.370 --> 09:49.010]  And then, right down from there, there was a photo booth where you could go in, get your picture taken, put it in Photoshop, monkey around with it for a minute, and out would come a glossy photograph of you hanging out with George W.
[09:49.210 --> 09:49.470]  Bush.
[09:49.470 --> 09:53.050]  And it looked totally real.
[09:53.770 --> 10:05.990]  Which makes me wonder, how many of the news photos we see in papers and on the net, and even how much footage we see on television, is not real.
[10:06.430 --> 10:09.950]  If it's that easy to manipulate it these days.
[10:10.510 --> 10:28.650]  Plenty of examples, you know, like the report on, to get America drawn into Gulf War number one, that Saddam Hussein's savage army was storming hospitals in Kuwait, and dumping premature babies out of incubators, and leaving the little babies to die on the floor,
[10:28.670 --> 10:30.570]  as they made off with the hospital equipment.
[10:30.970 --> 10:37.750]  And then they trotted out a seemingly shell-shocked young Kuwaiti woman, to testify before Congress, and thus the cameras as well.
[10:38.050 --> 10:40.030]  Look what they're doing to my country.
[10:40.030 --> 10:44.870]  Please, America, save Kuwait for democracy.
[10:45.710 --> 11:07.770]  Turned out, story planted, woman hired by the Hill and Knowlton agency, who were employed by the Kuwaiti royal family to use their PR prowess to wag the dog in this country, and convince Americans that it was in our best interest to launch a full-scale war in a mid-eastern country,
[11:07.770 --> 11:09.530]  hardly anybody even knew existed.
[11:09.830 --> 11:13.390]  Just to put them on their throne, democracy be damned.
[11:13.830 --> 11:19.170]  And it turned out the little girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.
[11:19.870 --> 11:20.870]  One example.
[11:21.390 --> 11:23.270]  Gulf of Tonkin incident.
[11:23.270 --> 11:24.410]  Even worse.
[11:25.370 --> 11:25.970]  1964.
[11:26.410 --> 11:28.170]  Splattered all over the corporate media.
[11:28.630 --> 11:31.970]  North Vietnamese gunboats fired on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
[11:32.190 --> 11:37.870]  And that was all it took for Lyndon Johnson to ram through the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
[11:38.210 --> 11:43.030]  Again, Congress, just like the PATRIOT Act, being afraid of being labeled soft on communism.
[11:43.310 --> 11:46.190]  Only one senator had the spine to vote against it.
[11:46.510 --> 11:47.070]  Kablam!
[11:47.450 --> 11:49.210]  Vietnam War is on.
[11:49.410 --> 11:50.770]  What did that get us?
[11:50.770 --> 11:52.910]  Almost 60,000 Americans dead.
[11:53.150 --> 11:57.570]  Many more, including some you know, maybe, who were maimed and scarred for life.
[11:58.210 --> 12:02.910]  Death toll, again, over there, estimated between one and two million Vietnamese.
[12:03.470 --> 12:09.450]  And we still haven't cleaned up the Agent Orange over there that's making people sick and having birth defects and all.
[12:09.750 --> 12:17.310]  And now corporate media just shrugs their shoulders and acknowledges, as though it's no big deal, that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened.
[12:17.310 --> 12:19.710]  Thanks for telling us now.
[12:21.350 --> 12:22.070]  And...
[12:24.050 --> 12:31.150]  Fast-forward to the feel-good, rah-rah war patriotic tale of Jessica Lynch.
[12:31.730 --> 12:35.830]  Hyped as the first POW rescue since World War II.
[12:36.110 --> 12:37.010]  Poor Jessica.
[12:37.430 --> 12:39.190]  Her Hummer got shot up or whatever.
[12:39.190 --> 12:42.950]  She was pumped full of holes, then stabbed by Iraqi troops.
[12:43.290 --> 12:45.750]  And then for some weird reason, they took her to the hospital anyway.
[12:46.230 --> 12:55.270]  But American commando stormed the hospital, fought off Saddam Hussein's elite revolutionary guard, and whisked poor Jessica back to safety.
[12:55.830 --> 12:59.710]  A great feel-good, isn't war-wonderful story if I've ever heard one.
[12:59.710 --> 13:11.830]  Trouble is, she even admitted on Diane Sawyer when her TV movie and the book she got a million bucks in advance for, although the ghostwriter took half, came out the same week.
[13:12.090 --> 13:14.730]  She admitted, that never happened.
[13:15.330 --> 13:15.890]  No.
[13:16.430 --> 13:19.450]  She got hurt because her Hummer overturned.
[13:19.570 --> 13:34.270]  And the people in the hospital tried to tip the Americans they had her, tried to send her back to the Americans in an ambulance, which got fired on, so they had to turn around and go back, and that there were no Iraqi soldiers in the hospital at all.
[13:34.610 --> 13:52.870]  They just came along firing blanks with cameras, piped immediately to the Pentagon media area in Qatar, Qatar, rather, and then over to us over here is the feel-good story of the dramatic live-action footage rescue of Jessica Lynch.
[13:53.410 --> 14:00.830]  Diane Sawyer, trying to rescue the lie, then said, but, but, weren't you raped?
[14:02.130 --> 14:05.090]  I don't recall anything like that.
[14:05.330 --> 14:08.190]  Well, that means you could have been, couldn't you?
[14:08.890 --> 14:17.310]  Anything to hang onto the lie, which makes me wonder, with that going on, does Saddam Hussein even exist?
[14:18.990 --> 14:21.450]  Does Osama bin Laden even exist?
[14:21.610 --> 14:23.810]  We never found him, not yet anyway.
[14:24.190 --> 14:33.750]  I mean, they always said Saddam had all these doubles, so who did they really pull out of the spider hole with a big old beard looking like Abbie Hoffman on really bad drugs?
[14:35.310 --> 14:39.810]  Then over and over again looped on corporate news, see, we caught Saddam!
[14:39.970 --> 14:40.990]  We're looking at his teeth!
[14:41.270 --> 14:42.250]  We're looking at his teeth!
[14:42.450 --> 14:43.790]  Over and over again they're looking at his teeth!
[14:43.950 --> 14:48.310]  Please, please, there's gotta be 500 tons of weapons of mass destruction somewhere!
[14:54.540 --> 15:06.880]  Brian Eno has a very good term for this, pointing out that our corporate media these days, in its place in controlling society, it ain't just propaganda anymore, it's prop-agenda.
[15:07.400 --> 15:12.460]  Not just controlling what we think, but what we think about.
[15:13.480 --> 15:17.000]  Iraq War, a complete disaster that will pay for the rest of our lives?
[15:17.120 --> 15:24.300]  No, no, no, what you've really gotta be worried about is big-ass terrorist acts like Janet Jackson's titty!
[15:24.300 --> 15:25.900]  Oh, my God!
[15:26.100 --> 15:28.280]  What are we gonna do about Janet Jackson's titty?
[15:28.640 --> 15:29.520]  Oh, my God!
[15:29.740 --> 15:33.120]  Will Martha Stewart go to jail, instead of, Oh, my God!
[15:33.300 --> 15:35.080]  Why isn't Dick Cheney in jail?
[15:40.680 --> 15:50.180]  What we're supposed to be here worried about is who's gonna get fired by Donald Trump instead of who should be fired in Washington!
[15:53.390 --> 16:13.110]  What we're supposed to be worrying about is which one of those hoes after hoes after hoes groveling before those snitty judges on American Idol will finally get crowned queen or king and get to roam the world singing the worst music I have ever heard!
[16:20.060 --> 16:22.160]  And they're moaning, Oh, my God!
[16:22.600 --> 16:25.060]  Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-1-1!
[16:25.200 --> 16:26.480]  We can't have that!
[16:26.820 --> 16:28.000]  It's slanted!
[16:28.000 --> 16:30.100]  It's propaganda!
[16:30.720 --> 16:32.560]  You want propaganda?
[16:32.560 --> 16:39.580]  Look at any corporate news channel you want as to how they're covering the election this time around!
[16:39.820 --> 16:49.640]  Never have I seen such open bias towards one candidate over the other as if Kerry is some huge threat to their corporate order!
[16:49.900 --> 16:59.120]  Every little thing Kerry says they blow up and pummel him on, but all the dumb stuff Bush says they just let him slide!
[16:59.920 --> 17:05.220]  I'm gonna extend childcare even to those who don't have children!
[17:07.180 --> 17:08.780]  Nobody called him on it!
[17:09.660 --> 17:15.820]  To Gore in the second debate, live TV, you're talking about Social Security like it's some kind of federal program!
[17:16.220 --> 17:17.260]  Which it is!
[17:18.460 --> 17:20.380]  And what does the USA Today say?
[17:20.600 --> 17:27.300]  But, well, Gore, quote, appeared better informed on the issues, but Bush, quote, appeared more likable!
[17:28.120 --> 17:30.600]  Appeared more likable!
[17:31.100 --> 17:32.400]  Therefore, he won!
[17:32.720 --> 17:34.000]  That's the way they slanted it!
[17:34.060 --> 17:39.960]  I mean, Howard Dean yells once, like the frat boy he is, and they just pummel him with that!
[17:40.260 --> 17:40.780]  Bush!
[17:41.020 --> 17:43.620]  You know, what the hell goes on behind closed doors with him?
[17:43.620 --> 17:53.940]  I have this vision that sometimes kept me awake at night of Bush running around in the war room or loose on the grounds of Camp David with his T-shirt pulled up over his head like Beavis in the cartoon.
[17:54.180 --> 17:55.300]  I'm the Great Cornholio!
[17:55.480 --> 17:56.660]  I'm the Great Cornholio!
[18:00.560 --> 18:02.740]  I need more air for my bunghole!
[18:05.790 --> 18:08.210]  They just let him slide!
[18:08.510 --> 18:13.150]  I mean, now they're talking, oh my God, look what happened at the Cary fundraiser!
[18:13.310 --> 18:14.270]  Oh no!
[18:14.270 --> 18:20.070]  People were using obscene language about our president in public!
[18:20.570 --> 18:23.210]  People were calling Bush a liar!
[18:23.450 --> 18:24.210]  Oh my God!
[18:24.550 --> 18:25.630]  A cheap thug!
[18:25.790 --> 18:28.050]  Cary must apologize for this!
[18:28.170 --> 18:30.830]  And typical Cary's trying to distance himself from it.
[18:31.030 --> 18:36.170]  So playing into the corporate media thing that artists should not be political.
[18:36.690 --> 18:48.110]  It's not an artist's place to be political unless their name is Arnold Schwarzenegger, unless their name is Toby Keith, or unless their name is Mel Gibson.
[18:48.710 --> 18:49.810]  Then it's okay!
[18:52.150 --> 19:02.070]  Mel Gibson, who's so Taliban ash-crack in the head, he's called people who criticize his movie in any way, Passion of the Christ, satanic.
[19:02.350 --> 19:08.430]  And one writer, I think it was from the New Yorker, he said he wanted to skin him alive and he wanted to kill his dog.
[19:09.370 --> 19:11.210]  How whack is that?
[19:11.570 --> 19:16.310]  I mean, all I can say about Mel's movie is I can hardly wait for the action figures.
[19:19.140 --> 19:19.490]  Yeah.
[19:20.050 --> 19:22.950]  Most openly biased election in my lifetime.
[19:22.990 --> 19:27.530]  But what's scarier still is the stuff they don't tell us.
[19:27.790 --> 19:41.670]  You know, as far as I'm concerned, corporate media deliberately under-reporting or deliberately slanting a story or forgetting to tell anybody the story even happened is the worst form of censorship going on in the world today.
[19:46.990 --> 20:08.630]  For example, it shouldn't have been almost three years later that people had to find out from a Michael Moore movie about the Saudi airliner we let into our supposedly well-guarded airspace after September 11th to pick up all these members of the Bin Laden family and other Saudi money bags and get them back safely home before the FBI could talk to them.
[20:09.170 --> 20:16.330]  Or the one from August 23rd of 2003 in a British newspaper called The Guardian.
[20:16.900 --> 20:22.130]  You know, the best newspaper I've found in the English language that's a daily paper and everything.
[20:22.130 --> 20:28.590]  It's amazing how much more actual news coverage you get outside of this country, even in Canada, than you do here.
[20:28.850 --> 20:32.950]  You know, more in-depth reporting, more sides of the story presented.
[20:33.350 --> 20:38.210]  Guardian you can read at guardian.co.uk, by the way.
[20:38.490 --> 20:48.450]  And among their many mind-blowing stories was August 23rd, 2003, a reporter named Rory McCarthy wrote a piece saying that George W.
[20:48.630 --> 20:59.370]  Bush and Pervez Musharraf, the dictator of Pakistan, had reached a little understanding with each other not to seize or kill Osama bin Laden.
[20:59.930 --> 21:03.530]  To let him walk and frolic in the woods or whatever.
[21:03.830 --> 21:19.650]  And the reason cited in the article was fear that there would be such a bad backlash if he got captured or killed with Pakistani involvement that Musharraf would fall and possibly be replaced by Taliban types, many of whom were in the Pakistani armed forces.
[21:20.410 --> 21:22.950]  But, obviously another reason too.
[21:22.950 --> 21:31.030]  Why pick up bin Laden now when Kerry might be leading in the fall and you can pick him up October 15th?
[21:31.230 --> 21:37.990]  If Bush is in any real trouble, expect bin Laden to magically appear.
[21:39.550 --> 21:40.870]  Never mind all that.
[21:40.990 --> 21:42.950]  What we need is regime change.
[21:44.350 --> 21:45.530]  Regime change.
[21:45.990 --> 21:50.750]  You know, another one of those little lovely buzz phrases I never heard before we went into Iraq.
[21:51.370 --> 21:51.810]  Before that.
[21:52.210 --> 21:54.730]  But don't other countries need a regime change too?
[21:55.190 --> 21:56.310]  You know, why that guy?
[21:56.770 --> 21:58.430]  Why not Saudi Arabia?
[21:58.950 --> 22:00.010]  Why not China?
[22:00.510 --> 22:01.570]  Why not Israel?
[22:01.950 --> 22:04.590]  Why not the United States of America?
[22:11.080 --> 22:24.920]  And by that I don't mean taking out corporatoid number one and replacing him with corporatoid number two in the form of John Kerry and expecting everything to magically improve.
[22:27.100 --> 22:52.620]  I mean bulldozing all those corporate puppets off the nearest cliff into the sea and replacing them with true patriotic Americans who give a damn about this country and the environment and other people in other countries and are more interested in doing what needs to be done and doing the right thing than piling up brownie points so they can get on Boeing's board of directors when they leave
[22:52.620 --> 22:54.260]  office or something like that.
[22:58.660 --> 23:15.160]  Again, my memory goes back far enough to when there was a difference between the Democratic and Republican Party besides gay rights and abortion and the people who ran for office were more interested in leadership than deal-making and all.
[23:15.440 --> 23:17.540]  But we have to go after Saddam Hussein.
[23:17.640 --> 23:18.860]  I saw him do this once on CNN.
[23:18.980 --> 23:20.720]  Bush cocked his head, got his little smirk.
[23:20.900 --> 23:23.620]  Saddam Hussein is an evil man.
[23:24.460 --> 23:26.100]  No argument there.
[23:26.380 --> 23:33.140]  I'm glad we don't live in a country run by somebody like that or none of us would be around to attend this conference today.
[23:34.500 --> 23:49.000]  But, Saddam Hussein was the same evil man he was throughout the last decade when he didn't attack us or his neighbors and the same evil man he was throughout the 1980s when we couldn't sell him enough weapons of mass destruction.
[23:49.280 --> 23:58.760]  Our golden boy, we prodded and paid to fight a war against the Ayatollah to make sure that the Ayatollah's fundamentalism didn't spread to Saudi Arabia.
[23:58.760 --> 24:08.000]  You know, we supplied him with all kinds of weapons, intelligence, all kinds of fertilizers and chemicals we knew he was going to use to gas his own people.
[24:08.120 --> 24:10.940]  And even after he started doing it, we supplied him with some more.
[24:11.200 --> 24:21.880]  And guess who went to Iraq in 1983 to shake Saddam's hand in front of the cameras to seal the deal that he was our new special ally in the Middle East?
[24:23.680 --> 24:24.720]  Donald Rumsfeld.
[24:24.720 --> 24:26.080]  Yeah.
[24:26.680 --> 24:32.280]  That's why Saddam says, you put me on trial, I'm calling Rumsfeld as a witness.
[24:32.960 --> 24:35.480]  See if they report that on CNN.
[24:35.940 --> 24:39.640]  And you know what Rumsfeld gave him as a token of our appreciation?
[24:40.080 --> 24:43.000]  A pair of golden spurs.
[24:45.600 --> 24:53.680]  Saddam was our golden boy to the point where he felt perfectly comfortable notifying us in advance he was going to invade Kuwait.
[24:54.000 --> 25:02.780]  And what did our Ambassador April Glaspie do but write him back saying, we have no opinion on your border disputes with other countries.
[25:03.140 --> 25:04.800]  Come on in.
[25:05.580 --> 25:08.720]  That was what we thought of Saddam Hussein at the time.
[25:08.920 --> 25:11.380]  And is this totally about oil?
[25:11.940 --> 25:14.060]  I think there may be more to it than that.
[25:14.300 --> 25:28.500]  Some of you may know of a publication called Harper's Magazine that in the first few pages always has a page called Harper's Index with all these mind-blowing facts and figures and statistics and all.
[25:28.720 --> 25:33.980]  And one of them in about May or so in 2002 really blew my mind.
[25:33.980 --> 25:45.520]  It said, amount we spend every year, and this is before the war, guarding our oil supply in the Persian Gulf, 50 billion dollars.
[25:47.280 --> 25:55.340]  Value of the crude coming from the Gulf that we actually use in this country, 19 billion dollars.
[25:55.860 --> 25:57.700]  What is wrong with this picture?
[25:57.920 --> 26:06.860]  Especially when the whole time we were telling everybody else in the world, don't you dare buy any of Saddam's oil because of the sanctions, we were buying two-thirds of his oil.
[26:07.100 --> 26:20.340]  And the only reason he could pump it out of the ground was he paid 28 billion dollars to a company called Halliburton to rebuild his oil infrastructure, Halliburton at that time, run by a guy named Dick Cheney.
[26:21.620 --> 26:26.680]  But what it really boils down to, I think, is the curse of the Wolfman.
[26:28.540 --> 26:29.800]  Now let me explain.
[26:29.800 --> 26:40.640]  There was a document that's been fairly widely documented now, 1991, commissioned by Bush's dad, called the National Security Guideline.
[26:40.940 --> 26:49.800]  And its authors were Paul Wolfowitz, a chicken hawk, and Louis Libby, another chicken hawk whose nickname is Scooter.
[26:50.160 --> 27:03.300]  And they came back with this document that was so wildly paranoid, it said that now that there's no more nuclear threat from the Soviets and the evil empire has collapsed, the world is a vastly more dangerous place.
[27:03.740 --> 27:19.440]  And because now we must view all our allies as, quote, potential competitors who had to be prevented from, quote, aspiring to a greater regional or global role than we have in mind for them.
[27:19.440 --> 27:22.320]  And it also said that U.S.
[27:22.960 --> 27:30.220]  military invasions of other countries should be, quote, a constant feature of global affairs.
[27:30.840 --> 27:39.180]  Even Bush's father thought this was insane and should have thrown Wolfman's scooter in a padded cell right then and there.
[27:39.340 --> 27:42.840]  But he just made them rewrite it and they've lived to wreck the world again.
[27:42.840 --> 27:47.140]  Wolfowitz, of course, is now number two to Rumsfeld in the Defense Department.
[27:47.420 --> 27:54.980]  Prediction is he's going to get Rumsfeld's job if Bush gets in again, while Scooter is Dick Cheney's chief of staff.
[27:55.600 --> 28:16.360]  When Clinton was in power, some of these thugs migrated over to a group called Project for a New American Century, that in addition to Wolfman and Scooter included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, and another visionary, Dan Quayle, who were bombarding President Clinton with letters and studies saying,
[28:16.560 --> 28:21.380]  we must invade Iraq right now and we should get rid of all U.N.
[28:21.480 --> 28:25.600]  peacekeeping missions everywhere and have American troops do all of it.
[28:25.780 --> 28:26.240]  Why?
[28:26.500 --> 28:30.060]  Well, I mean, Rumsfeld kind of looks like the guy in Pinky and the Brain, right?
[28:30.280 --> 28:32.140]  Take over the world!
[28:33.160 --> 28:34.600]  They said that was okay.
[28:34.660 --> 28:40.080]  And all we needed to jumpstart this was, quote, a new Pearl Harbor.
[28:41.580 --> 28:49.040]  And another thing factoring into all this is every time we go into that part of the world, we come to visit and decide to stay.
[28:49.440 --> 28:55.040]  We got military bases now in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, all because of all the problems.
[28:55.200 --> 28:57.760]  We're slowly moving most of that to the big new one in Qatar.
[28:58.220 --> 28:59.560]  Got one in Bahrain.
[28:59.780 --> 29:00.860]  Got one in Oman.
[29:01.300 --> 29:06.360]  Got one across from the bottom of Saudi Arabia, across the bottom of the Red Sea in a little country called Djibouti.
[29:06.360 --> 29:07.800]  Got them in Turkey.
[29:08.400 --> 29:09.600]  Put them up in Pakistan.
[29:10.280 --> 29:10.690]  Afghanistan.
[29:11.580 --> 29:13.660]  Halliburton intimately involved, of course.
[29:14.260 --> 29:15.080]  Uzbekistan.
[29:15.480 --> 29:17.700]  I think Tajikistan is the other one.
[29:17.700 --> 29:29.420]  And we're talking about keeping 14 military bases in Iraq permanently, regardless of whether the Iraqis want us to leave.
[29:29.820 --> 29:33.820]  14 new Guantanamo Bays, regardless of whether anybody wants it or not.
[29:33.820 --> 29:34.600]  Why?
[29:34.860 --> 29:45.180]  Why so much military presence in that part of the world, if that 19 billion dollars worth of crude is only 10% of our gluttonous consumption?
[29:45.820 --> 29:46.660]  Why?
[29:46.980 --> 29:51.540]  Unless it's to implement the curse of the wolfman.
[29:52.080 --> 29:53.060]  Hey France.
[29:53.660 --> 29:54.580]  Hey Germany.
[29:55.400 --> 29:56.180]  Hey China.
[29:56.660 --> 29:57.100]  Japan.
[29:58.120 --> 30:03.380]  You aspire to a greater regional or global role than we have in mind for you.
[30:03.660 --> 30:06.040]  We're just going to turn the faucet off.
[30:06.220 --> 30:12.200]  Because we don't have to have Persian Gulf crude, but we know that you do.
[30:12.600 --> 30:18.860]  And that means from now on, we've got you and your economies by the nuts.
[30:19.780 --> 30:22.820]  That's basically what that means.
[30:23.180 --> 30:26.580]  But what about the people who live there?
[30:27.000 --> 30:37.560]  Even Bush's father in his memoirs said the reason he didn't invade Iraq all the way and try to occupy the country, he listed all the things that are going wrong today.
[30:38.140 --> 30:43.460]  Bush said, well, he's the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength.
[30:43.700 --> 30:47.400]  There is a higher father that I appeal to.
[30:47.400 --> 30:50.620]  Well, they were so out of it.
[30:50.700 --> 31:00.000]  I mean, this is the problem when you rely on think tank yahoos to conduct foreign policy and chicken hawks to run a war.
[31:00.260 --> 31:08.740]  You know, you can memorize all the statistics and strategies you want, but that's no substitute for hanging out and talking with terrorists or whatever.
[31:08.980 --> 31:19.180]  It's the same as the difference between a baseball fan who knows everybody's batting average and all these weird statistics and actually playing on a baseball team.
[31:19.460 --> 31:27.780]  Dick Cheney, chicken hawk, said when we go into Iraq, I believe we will be greeted as liberators.
[31:27.780 --> 31:31.520]  We were not greeted as liberators.
[31:31.880 --> 31:33.940]  Whole country's going postal.
[31:34.960 --> 31:38.120]  Iraqis getting madder and madder that we ain't leaving.
[31:38.460 --> 32:00.260]  And while low-carb everything, including rum I've now noticed, is the big trend over here, kidnappings, beheadings, and bombings are the trend over there and already spreading outside of Iraq as the first sign of a worldwide intifada against us.
[32:00.260 --> 32:05.200]  Not just the Bush mob, us.
[32:05.580 --> 32:07.160]  That scares me.
[32:07.480 --> 32:10.540]  And the last thing we ever wanted over there was democracy.
[32:10.740 --> 32:13.740]  After all, our own president wasn't elected either.
[32:19.350 --> 32:25.910]  And if they did have an election, look who would win at this point.
[32:26.110 --> 32:31.290]  Whoever wanted to wage the most jihad against the infidel United States.
[32:31.290 --> 32:33.530]  And that just doesn't go for Iraq.
[32:33.530 --> 32:39.150]  It goes for the populace of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, you name it.
[32:39.410 --> 32:45.290]  And here's the real ticking bomb is half the population in those countries is under 25.
[32:46.010 --> 32:52.350]  And the job growth and the economic growth is nil, basically.
[32:52.790 --> 33:01.590]  Average Saudi income has been cut by two-thirds down to eight grand a year while the royal family makes off with all the money and we support them.
[33:01.790 --> 33:05.290]  And then Bush is saying, well, I don't understand why people hate us.
[33:06.010 --> 33:08.390]  They hate us because they hate our freedom.
[33:09.050 --> 33:12.470]  No, they hate us because we won't let them have any freedom.
[33:12.910 --> 33:14.510]  That's why they hate us.
[33:19.190 --> 33:31.450]  And instead of liberation, we seriously expected to get rid of Saddam and put in our own Saddam, a guy named Ahmed Chalabi, who hadn't set foot in Iraq in 47 years.
[33:31.790 --> 33:38.910]  But had Wolfman and the neocons convinced that a huge guerrilla army would rise to follow him.
[33:39.030 --> 33:42.970]  And eventually managed to round up a hundred guys before we went in.
[33:43.250 --> 33:49.510]  This guy came from the richest family in Iraq who had to flee the country in the late 50s when he was a teenager.
[33:49.510 --> 34:00.990]  And more importantly, he's on the run to this day from a 22-year prison sentence in Jordan for ripping anywhere from 30 million to 100 million bucks out of his own bank.
[34:01.770 --> 34:09.670]  That is the equivalent of somebody invading this country and saying, now that we've liberated you and you have your freedom, here's your new president.
[34:09.670 --> 34:13.130]  His name is John Dillinger, basically.
[34:13.810 --> 34:27.610]  And even though Chalabi is now on the outs with the Bush people, they figured out he's a con man, took us for 39 million bucks, got us into a war, and was apparently spying for Iran the entire time.
[34:28.450 --> 34:31.870]  You know, only Bush's people could fall for something like that.
[34:32.030 --> 34:33.370]  You know, the real intelligence failure.
[34:33.370 --> 34:39.230]  But Chalabi's brother is in charge of prosecuting Saddam Hussein still.
[34:39.690 --> 34:46.090]  And Chalabi's cousins and relatives have seized control of the Iraqi banking system still.
[34:47.050 --> 34:51.370]  And then Chalabi was merely supposed to act as a front for Bremer.
[34:51.550 --> 34:58.750]  When he came in, he walks in and fires 400,000 soldiers, replaces them with nobody.
[34:58.750 --> 35:02.090]  You know, which the soldiers said, shit, we still got our weapons.
[35:02.350 --> 35:05.490]  We didn't rise up and fight the Americans, and this is the thanks we get.
[35:05.590 --> 35:07.150]  No pay, no job, no pension.
[35:07.910 --> 35:14.590]  100,000 government bureaucrats who kept the country functioning, fired, replaced with nobody.
[35:15.250 --> 35:19.750]  All the cops, fired, replaced with nobody.
[35:20.290 --> 35:24.990]  No wonder all hell broke loose, basically.
[35:25.610 --> 35:43.050]  And, you know, after Gulf War number one, according to occupationwatch.org, which is a really interesting site to look at for what's really going on in Iraq and how the Iraqi people are really suffering over there from homelessness, disease, lack of clean water,
[35:43.410 --> 35:55.470]  electricity still ain't working, no jobs, no security, crime through the roof, women scared to go outside unless there's an American television crew with them to show that everything's safe and all.
[35:56.130 --> 36:04.530]  But they point out that after Gulf War number one, Saddam Hussein's people had the electricity and the phones up in two months.
[36:04.910 --> 36:10.950]  And it's still barely functioning if it's functioning at all in Iraq.
[36:10.950 --> 36:17.930]  And the really obscene part of this is things aren't getting done and things aren't working because they're not supposed to.
[36:18.890 --> 36:24.190]  Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, once said, he was asked, why do you rob banks?
[36:24.270 --> 36:25.730]  And he said, well, that's where the money is.
[36:26.610 --> 36:29.050]  That's what's going on in Iraq right now.
[36:29.570 --> 36:34.610]  Bremer, when he fired all those people, also announced Iraq is open for business.
[36:35.350 --> 36:51.450]  Not Iraqi business, not the experts who would know how the electricity grid actually worked and how to deal with the waterworks or might want to guard the facilities before they got looted right down to hospital beds while our troops stood idly by and Rumsfeld just said,
[36:51.710 --> 36:52.990]  oh, freedom is untidy.
[36:53.590 --> 36:56.470]  No, they weren't allowed to have any jobs.
[36:56.670 --> 37:14.750]  Only privateers and pirates who worked for companies like Halliburton and their subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root, Bechtel, and the rest, the ones who a long time ago got in on the gravy train in the Reagan days of billing the Pentagon $3,000 apiece for screwdrivers,
[37:15.090 --> 37:18.410]  $600 apiece for toilet seats, no questions asked.
[37:18.730 --> 37:21.650]  Clinton didn't bother to prosecute anybody when he got in.
[37:22.130 --> 37:26.570]  Gulf War number one, fax machines, $40,000 apiece.
[37:27.250 --> 37:27.870]  Why?
[37:27.870 --> 37:31.890]  Well, they don't get sand in them.
[37:32.910 --> 37:41.750]  All you have to do to keep sand out of a fax machine is put it in a box or wrap it in a plastic bag and save $40,000.
[37:42.330 --> 37:45.130]  But that's not how the game is supposed to be played, is it?
[37:45.190 --> 37:46.330]  It's where the money is.
[37:46.710 --> 37:54.470]  And with that in mind, I mean, Halliburton's already been busted for ripping us off for 30 million bucks and overcharging for gasoline.
[37:55.170 --> 38:01.490]  Kellogg, Brown, and Ruth, their subsidiary, got caught tripling the price of gym towels for soldiers.
[38:01.490 --> 38:02.650]  How petty is that?
[38:02.890 --> 38:08.830]  The excuse being, well, they're three times as much because we sewed the initials KBR onto the towels.
[38:08.830 --> 38:09.750]  Therefore, it's okay.
[38:10.830 --> 38:14.990]  Who knows what else is going on that we haven't even heard about yet.
[38:14.990 --> 38:26.610]  It was in that spirit that Bremer said to the Iraqis, yeah, you can get your clean water back, but it's going to cost you $15 billion and take four years.
[38:27.290 --> 38:31.350]  No wonder people are a little upset over there.
[38:31.510 --> 38:43.890]  And this is why, in contrast to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, get the infrastructure going again after World War II, modern money cost of that was $47.6 billion.
[38:43.890 --> 38:51.930]  Gulf War number one cost about $60 billion, most of which was paid, 80% of which was paid by our allies.
[38:52.250 --> 39:06.650]  But with this looting, corporate looting and racketeering and privateering going on in Iraq, Bush has already blown over $100 billion with much more to come.
[39:07.190 --> 39:13.730]  Last fall, he demanded another $87 billion and Congress just gave it to him.
[39:13.890 --> 39:15.710]  Almost no questions asked.
[39:15.890 --> 39:17.450]  Kerry did vote against that one.
[39:17.550 --> 39:18.970]  I don't know how Edwards voted.
[39:19.270 --> 39:24.790]  But of the $87 billion, 66 of it classified.
[39:25.530 --> 39:27.650]  Wouldn't even say how it's doled out.
[39:27.650 --> 39:33.470]  $412 million just for construction of Wolfman's military bases.
[39:34.290 --> 39:41.170]  And $353 million for the private sector, read bribes and graft.
[39:41.510 --> 39:45.610]  $400 million for two maximum security prisons.
[39:45.910 --> 39:50.650]  How do you blow $400 million on two jails?
[39:50.650 --> 39:54.590]  You can build a domed football stadium for that amount of money.
[39:54.830 --> 39:55.950]  What are they going to do?
[39:56.090 --> 39:59.710]  Put an Olympic-sized pool with gold faucets in every cell?
[40:00.190 --> 40:01.910]  Free heroin for life?
[40:02.230 --> 40:02.710]  No!
[40:03.330 --> 40:07.690]  We need that much money because, quote, you have to import the cement.
[40:09.710 --> 40:15.310]  What do you make cement out of that you can find everywhere in Iraq?
[40:15.790 --> 40:17.550]  Yep, got to import the cement.
[40:17.850 --> 40:24.810]  Another $100 million to build seven gated suburbs, American-style, probably for the American privateers.
[40:25.630 --> 40:30.170]  3,500 housing units only in a country where we've made millions of people homeless.
[40:30.170 --> 40:46.650]  Another $2.1 billion down the drain to put the oil facilities back together after Halliburton already got a no-bid contract for $12 billion to put up the oil facilities, signed almost two weeks before we went in on the war, in secret of course.
[40:47.170 --> 40:58.030]  But in spite of all that, for the oil infrastructure, another $900 million to import oil products in a country sitting on the second largest reserves in the world.
[40:58.030 --> 41:08.930]  And let's not forget, speaking of hacktivism or something, maybe not, a $54 million computer study of Iraq's postal service.
[41:09.650 --> 41:16.810]  For less than 10% of that, they could hire mailmen to just deliver the damn mail like they always did.
[41:17.090 --> 41:18.430]  Oh no!
[41:19.210 --> 41:32.930]  And another, now Bush wants another $25 billion, in addition to the $87 billion, including $100 million to hire private security to guard the so-called green zone.
[41:33.070 --> 41:34.230]  You know what the green zone is?
[41:34.450 --> 41:38.530]  It's a nice posh area with lots of office buildings in downtown Baghdad.
[41:39.090 --> 41:49.130]  We mysteriously forgot to bomb, then put a Berlin Wall up around it so the Iraqis can't get into their own downtown, and we intend to stay there.
[41:49.130 --> 41:52.410]  And the $100 billion is for 14 months.
[41:52.610 --> 42:01.090]  And we're also planning to build the largest and most fortified embassy ever constructed in the history of the world.
[42:01.310 --> 42:03.450]  We ain't giving them back their sovereignty.
[42:03.450 --> 42:07.310]  We plan to stay for a long, long time.
[42:07.310 --> 42:12.970]  And this is what our soldiers are dying for in Iraq right now.
[42:16.360 --> 42:17.780]  We're getting to that.
[42:19.160 --> 42:30.240]  All this before media activists managed to get out into the public the pictures and the footage from Abu Ghraib prison.
[42:30.240 --> 42:42.160]  Never mind, it's been no secret in the European media for a year earlier that people were being tortured to death in Afghanistan, conditions in Guantanamo Bay, and things like that.
[42:42.320 --> 42:47.000]  And these pictures never would have gotten out except for guerrilla media.
[42:47.460 --> 42:49.680]  Except for independent media.
[42:52.100 --> 42:54.200]  You're getting ahead of me here.
[42:54.940 --> 42:57.160]  I intend to get to all that intimately.
[42:57.160 --> 42:59.100]  And I don't have that much time left.
[42:59.200 --> 43:02.200]  I have so much of my big mouth needs to cover here.
[43:02.300 --> 43:08.960]  Anyway, you know, those prisons and what we're doing in there, that's what Saddam Hussein used to do.
[43:09.420 --> 43:12.060]  That's what Stalin and Hitler used to do.
[43:12.300 --> 43:17.620]  This is not the United States of America we were brought up to pledge allegiance to, is it?
[43:18.700 --> 43:29.260]  But Lindy England, you know, the female soldier grinning and giving the thumbs up and everything else, said, quote, we thought it looked funny, so we took pictures.
[43:29.780 --> 43:33.720]  We thought it looked funny, so we took pictures.
[43:34.340 --> 43:36.120]  What created that?
[43:36.920 --> 43:47.860]  She may look a lot like Squeaky Frome, but inside she's a hell of a lot more like Susan Atkins, the real psychopath of the Manson family.
[43:47.860 --> 43:55.880]  And if it was really just a few bad apples, which I doubt, doing this in the prisons, who was their Charles Manson?
[43:56.980 --> 43:57.580]  Rumsfeld?
[43:58.180 --> 44:00.160]  His boss, perhaps?
[44:00.660 --> 44:14.180]  And what's especially interesting to me is a lot of the people who've gotten caught torturing Iraqi prisoners, many of which we now admit were probably being held there for the wrong reasons, if any reason at all.
[44:15.240 --> 44:17.800]  Oh, that's not what my watch says, dude.
[44:18.300 --> 44:18.720]  Anyway.
[44:21.120 --> 44:26.260]  You know, a lot of them were prison guards over here.
[44:26.480 --> 44:35.260]  And if that's what they think is normal and funny over there, what are they doing to people that they think is acceptable over here?
[44:43.350 --> 44:57.330]  Occasionally, things leak out, like in 1996 when Bush was governor in Texas, a video snuck out of prisoners being forced to crawl, being beaten out, the crap beat out of them with batons, and being bitten by dogs, if that sounds familiar.
[44:57.990 --> 45:13.230]  Corcoran Prison in California, guards were caught staging basically cockfights with human beings, mysteriously opening doors to cells of prisoners who were in rival gangs, allowing them to bump into each other in the commons, try to kill each other.
[45:13.430 --> 45:16.830]  And then, well, we had to break up the fight, so we had to kill them.
[45:17.490 --> 45:18.770]  Placing bets and everything.
[45:18.950 --> 45:20.910]  Pelican Bay, Northern California.
[45:21.450 --> 45:29.970]  The prisoner, there was a mentally ill prisoner who finally won his lawsuit for damages years later after they immersed him in boiling water.
[45:30.630 --> 45:34.130]  You know, that's what's been going on in this country.
[45:34.390 --> 45:37.410]  And why, you know, the police always get away with all the brutality.
[45:37.410 --> 45:39.470]  My God, that rogue officer.
[45:39.750 --> 45:41.110]  You know what we did to him?
[45:41.470 --> 45:42.990]  We've reassigned him.
[45:43.410 --> 45:45.130]  Shot another black guy in the back?
[45:45.250 --> 45:46.690]  Oh, we've reassigned him.
[45:46.930 --> 45:49.290]  Suspended him 30 days without pay.
[45:49.750 --> 45:56.490]  Of course, this has probably also destroyed what little respect we have left in the Middle East, Europe, wherever.
[45:56.490 --> 46:02.570]  I mean, you know, Bush is now the most hated president abroad in history, by far.
[46:02.790 --> 46:09.430]  When people ask what they fear for their security, they don't say terrorist, they say mad cowboy disease, basically.
[46:09.790 --> 46:10.930]  Even in Canada.
[46:12.950 --> 46:20.410]  As Bill Maher put it, how bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein?
[46:21.590 --> 46:29.750]  I mean, the most constructive thing we could be doing is admit to the world right now, okay, we made a mistake, we're getting out.
[46:30.170 --> 46:31.930]  Get out of Iraq now.
[46:31.930 --> 46:35.390]  People responsible resign now.
[46:36.410 --> 46:43.630]  And end not just the military occupation, but end the economic occupation as well.
[46:47.820 --> 46:49.420]  They say, we can't do that.
[46:49.980 --> 46:51.740]  How are we going to lose face?
[46:52.020 --> 46:53.860]  We've lost it already.
[46:54.620 --> 46:56.200]  Well, how are we going to leave?
[46:56.360 --> 46:57.000]  It's like Vietnam.
[46:57.000 --> 46:58.500]  We have no idea how to get out.
[46:58.600 --> 46:59.780]  We never planned for that.
[47:00.160 --> 47:01.560]  Easy way to leave.
[47:01.960 --> 47:03.640]  Ships, trucks, and airplanes.
[47:04.380 --> 47:06.520]  Same as the way we went in.
[47:06.860 --> 47:15.320]  Yes, we owe the Iraqi people help in rebuilding the country we blew up after propping up Saddam Hussein in the first place.
[47:15.620 --> 47:22.480]  But that does not mean sending more troops into the desert to act as security for Halliburton and Bechtel.
[47:22.680 --> 47:29.180]  It means letting the United Nations or somebody else the Iraqi people actually respect run the show.
[47:29.700 --> 47:31.420]  We help them.
[47:31.420 --> 47:33.660]  We give them the money.
[47:35.320 --> 47:40.060]  Not we police them, but we help them.
[47:40.540 --> 47:44.000]  Of course, corporate republicrats won't hear of that.
[47:44.740 --> 47:53.800]  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat, and Kerry have both said, what we need to do is send 40,000 more troops to Iraq.
[47:54.240 --> 47:57.840]  40,000 more in to get the troops out?
[47:58.080 --> 48:00.940]  That doesn't make sense.
[48:01.560 --> 48:08.620]  And the way to make people like that listen is in the voting booth and in the streets.
[48:09.100 --> 48:10.400]  Starting now.
[48:13.850 --> 48:16.950]  Meanwhile, military recruiting.
[48:17.130 --> 48:21.570]  The Pentagon now admits it's going down, down, down, down, down.
[48:21.990 --> 48:25.990]  Almost a 25% drop in National Guard enlistments alone.
[48:26.290 --> 48:32.350]  According to ABC News, 600 soldiers who went on leave from Iraq never came back.
[48:32.350 --> 48:38.670]  Bush is waving $10,000 bonuses at any GI who's willing to re-enlist.
[48:38.850 --> 48:40.530]  And there aren't that many takers.
[48:40.730 --> 48:42.610]  So what is their solution to that?
[48:42.610 --> 48:46.810]  Well, this went up on a Defense Department website last fall.
[48:47.110 --> 48:48.230]  Defend America.
[48:48.610 --> 48:50.450]  Serve your community and the nation.
[48:50.990 --> 48:53.610]  Join your local draft board.
[48:54.310 --> 49:05.670]  And now that they've got the kind of people they want on the draft boards, they've upped the selective service budget, you know, the people who run the draft, by another $28 million for preparation.
[49:06.510 --> 49:15.910]  And already Bush has recalled 6,000 people who were already out of the military, back to duty and drafted them to go back to Iraq.
[49:16.270 --> 49:21.090]  And Rumsfeld has even talked about, well, we have a draft, it'll be a special skills draft.
[49:21.290 --> 49:24.730]  We mainly want people to fill specific holes in the military.
[49:25.050 --> 49:31.350]  People who know Middle Eastern languages and people who are good with computers.
[49:32.750 --> 49:34.230]  So, hello!
[49:34.990 --> 49:48.570]  And don't think you can get to Canada as easily this time because Tom Ridge made a deal with Gretchen up there before Gretchen left office to tighten their asylum laws so draft dodgers can't get in anymore.
[49:48.570 --> 49:58.030]  After all, it might cause terrorism and prevent them from drafting you to help die for Wolfman and Bush and Dick Cheney's friends.
[49:58.630 --> 50:00.310]  In World War II, it was different.
[50:00.890 --> 50:02.090]  The profiteers were...
[50:05.150 --> 50:06.210]  I know, I know.
[50:06.350 --> 50:06.990]  We'll get to that.
[50:08.810 --> 50:12.790]  The people who tried to profit off the war were considered traitors.
[50:13.150 --> 50:14.450]  They were brought to justice.
[50:14.450 --> 50:18.210]  And one of the lead prosecutors before he moved up was Harry Truman.
[50:18.710 --> 50:20.150]  Now, the opposite.
[50:20.530 --> 50:26.250]  But as far as I'm concerned, if Bill Clinton could get impeached for unauthorized weenie moistening...
[50:28.150 --> 50:42.850]  and the governor of California recalled for raising the tax on cars, shouldn't George Bush, Dick Cheney, and every member of Congress who keeps giving him the money for the war be impeached for treason?
[50:54.410 --> 51:04.230]  Meanwhile, what can we do to save ourselves from being dragged any further down the road to ruin and off a cliff and down the toilet by a bush, a dick, and a colon?
[51:06.650 --> 51:08.210]  Don't believe the hype.
[51:08.470 --> 51:10.550]  We are patriotic citizens too.
[51:10.750 --> 51:18.810]  Because we're the ones who give a damn about this country and give a damn about the world around us and are willing to get off our butts to make it better.
[51:23.960 --> 51:27.000]  And I'm all for insurrection in the street.
[51:27.000 --> 51:32.880]  But that doesn't get that much done without insurrection in the voting booth too.
[51:33.840 --> 51:35.820]  How many of you are registered to vote?
[51:37.380 --> 51:51.200]  That's way higher than most people I talk to, but it's far from a hundred percent and far from how many people would show up if we all went out and got more of our friends to register and show up and vote smart.
[51:51.200 --> 51:56.300]  Not just nationally, but one of the most important reasons to vote is local elections.
[51:56.840 --> 52:03.700]  It matters who's mayor, who's on the city council, who's in the state legislature, who's on the school board.
[52:07.720 --> 52:12.240]  And we have a privilege in this country that they don't have in Canada.
[52:12.380 --> 52:17.340]  They don't have in any European country I know of, and that's called the ballot initiative.
[52:17.340 --> 52:25.080]  The propositions where we get to vote yay or nay on changing the law when politicians are too corrupt or chicken shit to do it themselves.
[52:25.440 --> 52:38.520]  And when we show up, that's how we get things like medical marijuana, rent control, living wage laws, ecological land use laws and all.
[52:38.680 --> 52:43.320]  And if we don't show up, you can bet the Christian coalition and the Hummerheads will.
[52:48.670 --> 53:03.170]  So many people show up, so few people show up in local elections, that if more people like us show up, we have that much better chance of getting good people elected and good laws passed.
[53:03.990 --> 53:21.150]  And I'm hoping this whole groundswell of insurrection against Bush, against the war, will blossom into a much bigger version of the anti-corporate rule, anti-globalization spirit of Seattle insurrection too.
[53:25.940 --> 53:27.540]  Don't worry, I'm almost done.
[53:28.160 --> 53:41.420]  And the beauty of it all, no matter what they try to impose on us through Orrin Hatch or whatever else, I've said this every time, that's the beauty of the digital age, no matter what they do to try and cage us.
[53:41.800 --> 53:50.340]  Some bored teenager out there somewhere is gonna find a way to get around and wreck the whole thing.
[53:54.440 --> 53:59.560]  But what will happen to them if John Ashcroft is still the Attorney General?
[53:59.980 --> 54:02.920]  What will happen to them if Kerry is president for that matter?
[54:02.920 --> 54:09.780]  I can understand the anybody-but-Bush sentiment, but the last time people voted that way, we got Clinton.
[54:10.060 --> 54:11.500]  And then look what we got.
[54:12.040 --> 54:18.060]  NAFTA, WTO, the Telecommunications Act that gave away the airwaves to corporations.
[54:18.360 --> 54:22.640]  If Kerry gets in, this time we can't just go to sleep for eight years.
[54:22.640 --> 54:29.140]  We got to get the biggest blowtorch we can find and keep it up his ass the whole time he's there.
[54:35.300 --> 54:37.760]  Personally, I vote my conscience.
[54:38.220 --> 54:44.300]  And if I'm gonna vote for Kerry, he's got to convince me by telling me what he's gonna do about the drug war.
[54:44.540 --> 54:47.940]  Whether he's gonna abolish the PATRIOT Act, all of it.
[54:47.940 --> 54:52.220]  What he's gonna do to fix our welfare laws so poor people have a chance.
[54:52.620 --> 54:57.440]  And for that matter, when we have that blowtorch, what are we in this room gonna do?
[54:57.580 --> 54:59.640]  I mean, Steve Wozniak was here earlier.
[55:00.020 --> 55:11.120]  And there's always people at this convention who, you know, aren't half as down on the big, plundering CEOs as they wish they were one of them.
[55:11.120 --> 55:18.120]  You know, that's why so many people got conned in the dot-com boom in San Francisco by bigger greed heads.
[55:18.300 --> 55:19.720]  They just bought into it all.
[55:19.880 --> 55:21.840]  Don't let it happen to you.
[55:22.180 --> 55:28.100]  Help people build sharper bullshit detectors by spreading information and education.
[55:28.420 --> 55:32.320]  Knowledge is power, after all, and the power to influence.
[55:32.540 --> 55:35.860]  And break down the limits on freedom and make them harder to impose.
[55:35.860 --> 55:41.940]  You know, help make history instead of just watching it on TV or gossiping about it on the net.
[55:42.680 --> 55:50.100]  Resistance, after all, don't let anybody from the farty old left or the uber PC people tell you that resistance shouldn't be fun.
[55:50.560 --> 55:56.960]  Granted, it's not all Disney fun, but it's not some just grim struggle against the fascist pigs either.
[55:56.960 --> 56:01.640]  You know, some of these big protests, they've been like giant parties and everything.
[56:01.940 --> 56:05.240]  I don't have time for the pranks I was going to get to.
[56:05.480 --> 56:14.400]  But basically, this time, as much as file sharing and software are important, right now we're fighting for our survival.
[56:14.840 --> 56:21.340]  Not just the survival of our cultures, but the survival of freedom as we know it on this planet.
[56:21.340 --> 56:29.380]  We can't avoid getting in the ring with these people anymore, because they are already in the ring with us.
[56:29.840 --> 56:31.040]  Thanks for listening.
[56:48.760 --> 56:49.400]  Okay.
[56:50.240 --> 56:51.460]  My last time.
[56:51.820 --> 56:55.420]  You may remember last time I had... how many of you were here last time?
[56:56.300 --> 57:00.840]  I had these albums from corporate sales conventions.
[57:00.980 --> 57:03.220]  You can all start changing the stage, by the way, too.
[57:03.400 --> 57:05.700]  We got a music section going on now here.
[57:05.700 --> 57:08.140]  I wasn't able to bring any of those this time.
[57:08.140 --> 57:22.600]  For those of you who don't know, these were souvenir albums given by corporations at salesmen or executive conventions where they'd hire a vaudeville troupe to compose and perform a musical about how great the corporation is and all.
[57:23.260 --> 57:46.440]  So, for those... the person back with the CDs, take the one called Product Music that is the one with the little man on it and play track two from the Ford Motor Company and track three from the American Standard Toilet Fixture Convention of 1968.
[57:46.780 --> 57:47.820]  Have fun!
[57:49.740 --> 57:51.520]  Oh, and one other last thing.
[57:52.060 --> 57:56.880]  I do have some stuff out in the hall this time if anybody's interested in my spoken word albums.
[57:57.020 --> 58:01.940]  And also, I'm making a new music album with the Melvins, which should be out in October.
[58:01.940 --> 58:05.000]  I'm a tractor-driving man.
[58:05.320 --> 58:08.440]  If I'm bragging, don't mind me.
[58:09.380 --> 58:11.940]  When you're looking for me...