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Welcome to Mississippi Happenings.

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My name is David Olds and I'm your co-host and with me today is my friend, Jim Newman.

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Jim, how are you?

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I'm doing great.

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I've got a new airplane.

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You have a new airplane.

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Tell me about it.

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Okay.

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How nice is it?

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About 400 million.

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Oh, okay.

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May I ask where you got this $400 million airplane?

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Oh, there's a little country in the Middle East that really took a liking to me and just
decided they'd donate it to me.

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good.

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Well, that's a great topic to start out with.

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I want to uh introduce uh our guest today, and he is a second timer, and it's a joy to
have him with us and for him to uh be with us and share his knowledge.

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Today we have retired Rear Admiral Jamie Barnett.

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He is the adjunct professor at Ole Miss Center of Intelligence and Security Studies,
teaching national security and cyber security policy courses.

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And he has a sub stack, is Jamie's opinion aided by facts.

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Jamie, great to have you with us.

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So good to see you again.

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David, thanks so much for having me.

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Jim, thanks for having me.

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And if I didn't scare away any of your podcast viewers before, I appreciate having the
second chance.

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Absolutely.

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uh got some great comments about that podcast and you have a knowledge that most of us
don't have.

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You have first-hand knowledge.

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In your uh sub stack, opinion aided, you wrote about DIME and you said it, the majority of
the students and practitioners of national security and foreign relations know the acronym

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DIME.

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D-I-M-E, which stands for its categories of international power and influence.

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DIME, diplomatic power, information power, military power, and economic power.

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ah Jamie, I was just fascinated with that article and fascinated, but also a little bit...

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scared and terrified of what I read.

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please uh share with us your thoughts.

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Yeah, so great.

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And so you get an A on remembering the acronym, David.

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So, you know, the first thing I would start with is, you know, there's an American
tradition of not being very interested in foreign affairs, international affairs.

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really, public only really focuses on that when there is some crisis or problem or those
foreign affairs have somehow or another invaded our shores.

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And so, you know, we see that every day.

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I mean,

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Americans don't keep up with the fact that Russian jets have invaded Estonian airspace and
that the Russians are interfering with Romanian elections.

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And so there's it just goes on and on about what we just don't fight.

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It's not on our radar.

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And what is on the radar actually, Jim brought up.

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mean, we're talking a lot about a jet that Qataris want to give us.

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In some ways it's a distraction because it is blatantly unethical and against the
Constitution's emoluments clause.

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And I feel like ultimately that's the way that it'll be disposed of.

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I think it'll be too expensive, take too long.

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And if they really want to do it, if they want to really do something for the United
States, why don't they expand our base in Doha?

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Or if they want to contribute some money to expand in our...

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our bases in the United States, we could do that.

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Or they could just give the jet to the United States and not to President Trump
personally, in which case I'm not really sure what we do with it because it would be uh a

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lot of money and time to actually fit it for governmental use.

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But we don't focus on foreign affairs.

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But that doesn't mean that something's not happening with it just because the public isn't
doing it.

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And so we have these things.

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How do we make nations do what we think is in our best interest?

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Or how do we find ways for us to seek a common interest?

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And that is these four principles of international power influence, diplomatic,
informational, military, and economic.

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And the United States has been fabulous in that for the last eight decades.

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when we finally emerged from World War II and took on the mantle of being a superpower.

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And then after the fall of the Soviet Union, the sole superpower.

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um And in very rapid order, the Trump administration has diminished each of those
categories.

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When you mentioned the aircraft and security, I remember when we, the United States.

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built the embassy in Russia, in Moscow.

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And then we couldn't take possession of it because when they started checking it out,
there were spy bugs everywhere.

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And come to find out, we let the Russians build it with no supervision.

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The Russians were very, very clever.

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They embedded listing devices inside cinder blocks that use PZ Electric feature so they
didn't actually have to have batteries.

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it was just, it was just, and yeah, we never took possession of the building.

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uh And you know, it's another aspect uh of my national security class.

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If you don't mean, can I get academic for just a minute?

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Please do.

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Yes.

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also have not heard of a man named George Kennan.

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George Kennan was a Soviet and Russian uh expert and was uh under April Harriman, was in
Moscow, was the, uh ultimately the ambassador, the US ambassador to Russia, or maybe I

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should say to the Soviet Union.

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And at one point, the Department of Treasury was trying to deal with the Soviet Union and
they sent him a request.

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to Moscow and said, can you kind of explain to us how the Soviets act?

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And he sent back what became known as the long telegram.

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It was 5,000 words at a time when most telegrams were between 30 and 50 words.

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And what he laid out, now this is a uh very broad simulation or,

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simplification of what he said, but he basically says you cannot treat the Russians like
other countries.

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You have to know that they will deceive you, they will lie to you, they will not follow
through on what they say because they think that you're a decrepit, uh decadent uh

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democracy that will ultimately fall.

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So, you all they have to do is wait you out.

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And that has really in some ways been true for Tsarist Russia, and it's true for Putin's
Russia too.

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And so those concepts that George Kennan helped form was called containment.

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oh You're not gonna be able to really deal with them like other nations.

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You can't treat them diplomatically.

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You can just contain them.

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Well, now we're back into another superpower oh confrontation.

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We're back to major power competition.

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concepts of containment and that we cannot trust the Russians need to come back.

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Well, Khrushchev told us that we were going to fail from within.

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Right.

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Well, and I hope he's not right, but I mean, the fact of the matter is that he was acting
on good authority.

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The founders of the United States also knew that democracies fall from within.

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And, you know, it goes back to what we, I think we talked about this last time.

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Benjamin Franklin's answer to the woman who asked him, what have you wrought?

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you know, a republic, if you can keep it.

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And we've been keeping it for a long time, you know, sometimes better than others.

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But I do think it's at risk right now.

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And that's probably a discussion for another day, just the question of the rule of law,
which we see assaulted every day.

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You mentioned that Trump was dismantling this process of dime.

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In what ways has he worked to dismantle this?

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Well, David during the first administration, oh Trump uh assaulted the Department of
State.

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uh He dismissed very senior officers.

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uh And this wasn't because he was ticked off at them.

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This was when he first came into office.

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And you know, um it takes a long time to grow a Foreign Service officer, to study another
country, to learn its language, to learn its culture.

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to build relationships with that country, whether they're an adversary or an ally or
somewhere in between.

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And so that was tremendously upsetting.

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The other thing that he did, which we're still paying for, is he pulled out of the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP.

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The Trans-Pacific Partnership was the United States dealing with, I forgot exactly how
many, but I want to say it's 10 to 15 Pacific...

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you know, nations, East and West, oh and not China.

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And the idea was to counter China's influence in the Pacific West.

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And the thing that China did immediately after that was go in and start dealing with those
countries.

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So that was kind of the baseline from the first administration.

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Second administration, he's done even worse.

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I mean, he's come in and dismissed

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uh Thousands of officers just gotten rid of them.

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uh I'm even concerned about the fact that he's invited uh people to take voluntary
retirement.

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We lose a lot of uh experience there.

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So that diplomatic power is incredibly important to us because we really don't want to use
our military power.

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We want to achieve our national means, our national ends.

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without military power.

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And so it's just, it's just really, you know, we shuddering embassies, he's cutting back
on programs.

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We've already talked about what he's done on USAID.

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There were, just got so much goodwill around the world, uh, from the programs.

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And you know, that, that, that cost us less than 1 % of our annual federal budget.

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And, um,

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And of course the Chinese have come right in behind that and scooped up those programs,
particularly in uh Africa, but elsewhere as well, because uh America has come across as

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seeming uh untrustworthy.

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And we've done the same with our allies.

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We pulled out of the World Trade Organization, basically.

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We pulled out of the World Health Organization.

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We pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords.

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so, know, things that we have done, you know,

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We've even basically abrogated uh treaties that Trump negotiated, including the one
between um the refit of the treaty between Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

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So the tariffs have just uh done tremendous uh harm to our worldwide standing and trust.

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um

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We can go through each one of the acronym names if you want to or I can stop and breathe
and you can let us, uh let me know if you have other questions.

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was going to ask you since you brought it up.

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ah It sounds like that you might possibly approve of the lifting of sanctions of Syria.

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Well, you know, it's interesting.

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That's one of the things I teach my students is when you're dealing with national
security, there's not a decision that is not complex.

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And when, you know, when you optimize one decision, you're probably de-optimizing
something else.

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So the question of Syria is hard.

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And the reason is, is that you've got somebody with blood on his hands that now run at the
country.

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Now we're really happy about the fact that he overthrew Bashad.

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I mean, we're glad that he's gone.

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And there's a negotiating room there with regard to those oh sanctions.

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It looks to me like we're not negotiating.

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We're just reducing them.

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And Saudi Arabia and other countries, other Arabian countries request.

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What we should be doing is saying, throw the Russians out of their Syrian port.

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you know, start acting like a nation that doesn't promote terrorism.

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And so there is an opportunity to deal with them.

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We have dealt with people that we would not consider our friends in the past successfully.

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And there's an opportunity there.

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I don't know that we're capitalizing on it right now.

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David, I'm sorry I interrupted you.

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No, no, no, that's fine.

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oh Let's talk, in a way, let's go back to DIME again, you mentioned turning the lights out
on informational power.

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Talk to us a little bit about Voice of America and what it was and what it is now under
the Trump administration.

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Sure, and if I can take a step back even from that, mean, we use information to influence
world opinion, and so do other nations.

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They use information to influence our perception of them, and this has been going on for a
long time, all the way back to Roman times.

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And America's had a tremendous advantage in that, what President Reagan and others called
the Shining City on the Hill.

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We were kind of the example, the democracy that worked, that created uh economic
prosperity for our people and educational and uh freedom of speech and all that goes with

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it.

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And that got promoted through our movies, our music and our culture.

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mean, people all over the world at one point were trying to get American blue jeans.

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I mean, so there was just so much influence there that we were able to take advantage of.

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And other countries do that too.

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I we think of France as very stylish and their wine is very good.

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Those are the type of informational things that we've used.

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Now, all that we've just mentioned on democracy, uh and diplomacy in particular, also it's
been affected by this.

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These tariffs have reduced our standing around the world because it's affected people's
pocketbooks and their confidence in their economies.

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But also in the past, we have used various aspects, specific instruments of information.

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And we started within about two months after the US entered World War II with Voice of
America.

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And it was, you know, it has evolved into scores of languages pumped into uh countries
that uh do not have a free press, by and large autocracies.

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Some of the countries that it's the only one they get and there are various uh

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We've heard of Radio Free Europe, there's radio and television, Marti, uh Spanish
language, all these sort of things, getting information too.

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But sometimes that's the only information that's true that they get.

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In one fell swoop, by the dismissal of Voice of America, by Carey Lake, which the overall
organization is called the US Agency for Global Media.

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basically just dismiss them, even though it's supposed to be independent, congressionally
funded, congressionally mandated.

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And they've launched a lawsuit and the judge has said, no, you can't do this.

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But the fact of the matter is that they can be starved and I have a feeling that they will
not be funded past September 30th of this year.

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And so it looks like it's going dark.

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uh for millions and millions of people in the world.

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And then I did an update for the article you mentioned like that because it looks like
it's even worse than that.

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uh Carey Lake has contracted with an extreme news organization called One American Network
News, or News Network, OAN, and uh that is going to basically pump pro-Trump

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information around the world.

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So that becomes like a state media.

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oh And we were already concerned by the fact that uh Elon Musk with his hundreds of
millions of followers on Twitter X, X Twitter, and Trump's true social was already

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creating kind of this state social media that's affecting things for which there's no
filter.

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uh

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the free press, the fourth estate with professional journalists acts as something that can
sift through and find what is true.

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So in my way of thinking, it's worse than it possibly could have been.

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And the information power is now maybe it's put a lot of people in the dark.

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It's left them open to the state medias in those countries and what they're gonna be
getting from the United States.

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is going to be very slanted in favor of Trump, who he knows does not have a strong
adherence to the truth.

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That's uh absolutely frightening.

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Are we losing our democracy and are we becoming...

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oh

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And I'm not, you know, are we coming, becoming an uh authoritarian nation or a fascist
nation or what's happening?

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What's, what's happening to us right now?

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In your opinion.

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a little bit from dime right now, but I'll be happy to speak about that.

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And the aspect of it is, yeah, we mentioned rule of law.

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uh The rule of law or the checks and balances that hold uh the president to account.

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And the Congress has uh totally defaulted on its ability to hold the president to account.

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Now, this is a long time in coming.

215
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It goes back.

216
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uh

217
00:21:06,628 --> 00:21:13,051
certainly into the Ronald Reagan years when there was this concept hatched totally.

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mean, doesn't go back to the founding of our country of the unitary president.

219
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As a matter of fact, I would tell you that the founders were afraid of a unitary
president.

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And so the concept of separation of powers is that each of the three co-equal branches
would be jealous of those powers.

221
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And the Congress has become very not jealous.

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It has ceded power to the president, even as the president does things that are clearly
unconstitutional or illegal.

223
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So the very conservative former Federal Circuit Judge, Judge Ludig, has an article in the
Atlantic this week, really in its last 24 hours.

224
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where he goes back down chapter and verse of every major executive order that the
President Trump has signed and said why it is illegal, why it is unconstitutional.

225
00:22:12,947 --> 00:22:17,850
And he's very much concerned that that is against the rule of law.

226
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The arrest of the judge who they accused of letting an illegal immigrant get away, he uses
as an example, they did not.

227
00:22:30,278 --> 00:22:35,542
use a, um, a judicially approved warrant on that.

228
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And so the arrest of judges is another indicator of a breakdown in the, uh, in the rule of
law.

229
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And you may not know it, but all of our constitutional rights are being assaulted, our
Sixth Amendment constitutional rights to, uh, representation, when he goes after law

230
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firms.

231
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And I'm very proud of some of the law firms that I know in Washington, DC that have stood
up to it, but not all of them have.

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So all of these across a broad front, our democracy is being assaulted.

233
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And the only place where it seems to be holding up right now is uh in the courts.

234
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oh The courts are routinely saying these executive orders do not pass constitutional
muster.

235
00:23:26,502 --> 00:23:40,911
They're routinely saying, you you can't claim that we're being invaded uh like a military
invasion because that's what the Alien uh Act, Enemy Alien Act was all about.

236
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So for right now, the one guard rail that seems to be holding up are the courts.

237
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uh And we'll see if they can withstand it, how long they can stand it.

238
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So we're at risk.

239
00:23:53,388 --> 00:23:54,258
Yeah.

240
00:23:54,258 --> 00:23:57,659
And I wasn't ignoring you while you were talking.

241
00:23:57,699 --> 00:23:59,100
You mentioned the rule of law.

242
00:23:59,100 --> 00:24:10,663
And I was just looking up what Chief Justice John Roberts said recently ah that the rule
of law is the most endangered.

243
00:24:11,683 --> 00:24:14,744
I thought that's...

244
00:24:15,444 --> 00:24:20,046
And seems that uh in most...

245
00:24:20,046 --> 00:24:21,336
And tell me...

246
00:24:21,956 --> 00:24:34,086
where I'm wrong and it's, but it seems like all of the courts in the Supreme Court are
kind of siding with what Trump wants to do.

247
00:24:34,086 --> 00:24:35,710
Is that correct?

248
00:24:37,434 --> 00:24:49,758
So far, I mean, there have been some that where they have, uh but I mean, David, if you
remember a couple of weeks ago, there was a question of, you know, whether or not uh

249
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undocumented uh immigrants into the nation have a right of due process.

250
00:24:56,900 --> 00:25:03,762
And there was a five, four decision by the uh Supreme Court and I apologize, I don't
remember the name of it right this now.

251
00:25:03,762 --> 00:25:04,770
But one of the...

252
00:25:04,770 --> 00:25:18,335
interesting things is even though there was a five four decision on how it should come
out, all nine agreed that illegal immigrants are owed due process.

253
00:25:18,456 --> 00:25:30,460
Now that is a fundamental, mean, if due process, and due process, you know, is just simply
the right to know what you're being accused of and the opportunity to be heard about it,

254
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to give your side of the story.

255
00:25:32,601 --> 00:25:34,102
It's not much.

256
00:25:34,671 --> 00:25:43,158
It's not a guarantee that you're going to get justice, but if you don't get due process,
there's almost a guarantee that you're not going to get justice.

257
00:25:43,158 --> 00:25:50,883
And so I was, I was encouraged that even a Supreme court judges that I think get it wrong
a lot of the time got it right on that one.

258
00:25:51,444 --> 00:26:02,353
So, you know, right now, um, you know, it seems to be, you know, holding and what justice
Roberts was talking about there was in a very unusual thing.

259
00:26:02,353 --> 00:26:04,154
He does not speak out.

260
00:26:04,422 --> 00:26:16,289
But he was, essence, answering the president who said that a judge should be impeached for
giving Trump a bad decision, a decision that Trump doesn't agree with.

261
00:26:16,289 --> 00:26:23,173
And we have in the law a way to complain about decisions we disagree with.

262
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It's called an appeal.

263
00:26:25,815 --> 00:26:31,018
But threatening judges, uh there's, I'm very concerned about...

264
00:26:31,018 --> 00:26:32,158
uh

265
00:26:32,350 --> 00:26:38,935
and I hope a lot of people will hear about this, about this new pizza strategy.

266
00:26:38,935 --> 00:26:53,865
uh So a judge whose uh son was murdered uh during a pizza delivery, the pizza delivery was
just a ploy to get him to open the door, and now she's getting uh pizzas delivered that

267
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weren't ordered.

268
00:26:54,966 --> 00:26:59,749
Other judges are getting pizza delivered in her son's name.

269
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You know, it's a threat.

270
00:27:01,790 --> 00:27:15,101
And uh clearly uh threatening attorneys, threatening judges, trying to intimidate them is
much more indicative of the types of autocracies that we wish to avoid.

271
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uh And so there needs to be people speaking out against this.

272
00:27:20,386 --> 00:27:23,488
If we disagree with the judge, fine, appeal it.

273
00:27:23,488 --> 00:27:31,000
uh But right now, uh the whole judicial system, which is a co-equal branch,

274
00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:43,794
And one of the decisions that came out recently uh was, know, they were basically the
Trump administration was saying, well, you shouldn't impede the presidential's prerogative

275
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in this.

276
00:27:44,854 --> 00:27:51,416
And the judge basically said, you're trying to write Article III of the Constitution out.

277
00:27:51,416 --> 00:27:57,688
That's exactly what we're supposed to do is question the decisions of the executive
branch.

278
00:27:58,906 --> 00:28:04,824
Jim, you had a comment uh on that, the real law.

279
00:28:06,808 --> 00:28:10,051
Admiral, you and I both read the same article in the Atlantic.

280
00:28:10,051 --> 00:28:18,676
ah And I don't think, there's so many distractions.

281
00:28:20,798 --> 00:28:24,020
is, he's an artist at distraction.

282
00:28:24,020 --> 00:28:30,805
ah If it's not the airplane, it's the Memcoin, it's the...

283
00:28:31,973 --> 00:28:35,833
$250,000 dinner, it's always something.

284
00:28:36,873 --> 00:28:43,813
He's got to have his name on this five o'clock news or six o'clock news.

285
00:28:43,913 --> 00:28:49,533
And he will do whatever it takes to stay in the public domain.

286
00:28:50,294 --> 00:29:03,634
And what I think a lot of people don't realize is what you brought up and what that
article pointed out is that of all of these presidential orders that he's given, probably

287
00:29:03,634 --> 00:29:08,534
95 % of them are not void, are not legitimate.

288
00:29:10,654 --> 00:29:16,194
Like the recent firing of the Library of Congress woman.

289
00:29:16,434 --> 00:29:19,254
The Library of Congress belongs to Congress.

290
00:29:20,168 --> 00:29:25,860
It doesn't belong to the president or that branch of government.

291
00:29:25,860 --> 00:29:27,621
It belongs to Congress.

292
00:29:27,621 --> 00:29:29,181
They have that right.

293
00:29:29,181 --> 00:29:33,262
So we're going to spend money to go to court.

294
00:29:33,323 --> 00:29:37,544
And I think the courts will find that he cannot do that.

295
00:29:37,644 --> 00:29:40,805
And she'll probably get her job back if she wants it.

296
00:29:40,805 --> 00:29:43,986
I don't know why she would, but, uh,

297
00:29:45,615 --> 00:29:46,848
Yeah, there's a lot of jokes.

298
00:29:46,848 --> 00:29:51,829
concerned about the personnel aspect and the way that he's treated federal employees, Jim.

299
00:29:51,829 --> 00:30:05,493
uh they got rid of a lot to nearly 20,000 people just by saying, hey, sign up and leave
and we'll pay you through September or something like that.

300
00:30:05,493 --> 00:30:06,633
Fired a bunch of more.

301
00:30:06,633 --> 00:30:13,575
And then even in the last couple of weeks, one of the things that I wrote about on my sub
stack was schedule F.

302
00:30:13,575 --> 00:30:14,477
Something else.

303
00:30:14,477 --> 00:30:18,109
America's not paying attention to because there's like you said, there's so much else.

304
00:30:18,109 --> 00:30:26,032
There's so many Qatari jets that we have to deal with and you know, immigration gold
cards, any number of other things that he does.

305
00:30:26,032 --> 00:30:37,797
But Schedule F is going to convert 50,000 federal employees to oh partisan appointees.

306
00:30:37,797 --> 00:30:42,098
More particularly, he can fire them for being disloyal.

307
00:30:42,098 --> 00:30:44,239
uh And so this is

308
00:30:44,251 --> 00:30:45,061
terrible.

309
00:30:45,061 --> 00:30:51,355
It reverses over a hundred years of civil service uh protections.

310
00:30:51,776 --> 00:30:59,980
By the way, mean, people can respond through May 23rd to the proposed Schedule F rule at
OPM.

311
00:30:59,980 --> 00:31:08,926
uh You know, I don't know that that Rouse is going to listen to us, but at least we can
complain about it.

312
00:31:08,926 --> 00:31:11,419
But once that goes into effect, what that

313
00:31:11,419 --> 00:31:19,099
in essence does to 50,000 federal employees, they know that they can be fired at an
instant.

314
00:31:19,439 --> 00:31:32,299
So they're going to, I think, have to adhere or they're going to feel like they have to
adhere to whatever degradations or illegal actions the president wants to take.

315
00:31:33,019 --> 00:31:41,498
And here's the thing, you know, we talk about the public service of serving in the
military.

316
00:31:41,498 --> 00:31:44,489
and the sacrifices that have to be made.

317
00:31:44,489 --> 00:31:54,191
uh President Trump, and I'm afraid the Republican Party largely, has come about
denigrating federal service, public service.

318
00:31:54,191 --> 00:32:06,224
A lot of times they have expertise in a field where they could be paid a lot more
someplace else, but they're doing it because they feel like they're doing something good

319
00:32:06,224 --> 00:32:07,174
for the nation.

320
00:32:07,174 --> 00:32:10,767
I served with many of them at the Federal Communications Commission.

321
00:32:10,767 --> 00:32:13,708
dedicated people who want to make it right.

322
00:32:13,909 --> 00:32:28,357
And the fact that we'd have this many, tens of thousands of federal employees leaving the
service, oh there's going to be something that we'll have to pay for that.

323
00:32:28,357 --> 00:32:39,203
There is damage that's being done that we may not know for weeks, months or years, because
somebody that we needed in a seat in Washington DC or some other,

324
00:32:39,797 --> 00:32:42,763
position across the country isn't there.

325
00:32:43,178 --> 00:32:54,910
Well, if you just think back to Ronnie Reagan when he fired all the FAA controllers when
they were on strike, the situation at Newark airport is

326
00:32:56,980 --> 00:33:10,076
The ultimate result of that, it takes years and years to have a controller trained well
enough to manage the job he's given to do.

327
00:33:10,756 --> 00:33:12,357
And we don't have enough.

328
00:33:12,357 --> 00:33:15,358
We've never had enough since Reagan fired him.

329
00:33:15,579 --> 00:33:24,019
Yeah, was, you know, was applauded by the anti-union people, but the fact of the matter is
they were, the unions were telling them what they needed.

330
00:33:24,019 --> 00:33:28,459
They needed more people, better working conditions and more money.

331
00:33:28,459 --> 00:33:34,659
But I think the main thing is, is that they saw is that the system even then was under
stress.

332
00:33:35,304 --> 00:33:37,258
And look where we are today.

333
00:33:37,963 --> 00:33:39,475
Nothing's changed.

334
00:33:39,651 --> 00:33:45,916
Jamie, earlier when you were talking about schedule F, you mentioned O-B-E-M.

335
00:33:45,916 --> 00:33:49,884
oh

336
00:33:49,884 --> 00:33:52,964
so that's the Office of Personnel Management.

337
00:33:53,484 --> 00:34:07,603
So OPM is the agency in the United States that handles most of the personnel, not all the
personnel, but it handles the rules, the HR rules for the government.

338
00:34:08,722 --> 00:34:14,865
Are federal employees ah forbidden to form a union?

339
00:34:16,267 --> 00:34:20,849
There are some significant restrictions on federal employees forming unions.

340
00:34:20,849 --> 00:34:22,793
There's some exceptions to that.

341
00:34:23,394 --> 00:34:29,599
But, um you know, they're not allowed to do collective bargaining.

342
00:34:31,844 --> 00:34:43,551
because it seems to me that they're not on an equal footing when it comes to their
continued employment.

343
00:34:43,551 --> 00:34:45,048
ah

344
00:34:45,048 --> 00:34:45,347
right.

345
00:34:45,347 --> 00:34:50,121
And that is why the civil service regulations are so important.

346
00:34:50,121 --> 00:35:02,571
um Typically what's happened is the federal employee organizations lobby to strengthen the
federal service rules.

347
00:35:02,571 --> 00:35:10,376
And there are various organizations, Communication Workers of America, Association of
Federal Government Employees.

348
00:35:10,376 --> 00:35:11,805
oh

349
00:35:11,805 --> 00:35:23,789
are organizations that have done a lot of good advocating for civil servants in a
particular time when the Congress has not generally stood up for them.

350
00:35:24,560 --> 00:35:29,464
I think we just ought to maybe move Washington DC to Mississippi.

351
00:35:29,805 --> 00:35:36,170
And in Mississippi, we've got employment at will so they can just fire whoever they want
whenever they want.

352
00:35:36,991 --> 00:35:38,432
And there's no problem.

353
00:35:38,496 --> 00:35:41,902
is what I'm afraid of that's going to happen with schedule F.

354
00:35:41,902 --> 00:35:44,525
Yes, that's what it sounds like.

355
00:35:46,158 --> 00:35:51,015
How about the money part of DIME, the monetary part?

356
00:35:52,218 --> 00:35:54,152
You talking about Trump's pocketbook?

357
00:35:54,152 --> 00:36:09,605
monetary part, uh on the economic power, uh we really have been at the top of the heap for
a long time.

358
00:36:10,326 --> 00:36:19,533
The tariffs have upset that and we were already being threatened, Jim, uh because uh

359
00:36:19,701 --> 00:36:30,581
and this just a quick history lesson, even before the end of World War II, President
Roosevelt could see that we needed a way forward.

360
00:36:30,581 --> 00:36:32,701
And it wasn't just the United Nations.

361
00:36:32,881 --> 00:36:45,601
There was a conference among the allies at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 to form
what has been for the last 80 years, the world's financial system.

362
00:36:45,601 --> 00:36:48,425
So this was to create the

363
00:36:48,425 --> 00:36:51,666
the World Bank to help rebuild uh Europe.

364
00:36:51,666 --> 00:36:58,968
This was the international monetary fund so that there would be a stable currencies around
an exchange system.

365
00:36:58,968 --> 00:37:09,491
And a lot of things that got set up like SWIFT and the ability to um exchange money uh
confidently and securely.

366
00:37:09,491 --> 00:37:15,231
um set up the, at that time they set up the general agreement on

367
00:37:15,231 --> 00:37:18,832
tariffs and trade, which became the World Trade Organization.

368
00:37:18,832 --> 00:37:25,075
All of those things were put into place and we have used those uh very effectively.

369
00:37:25,075 --> 00:37:27,526
It's benefited the United States and our allies.

370
00:37:27,526 --> 00:37:30,067
It's also benefited our adversaries.

371
00:37:30,147 --> 00:37:33,579
China and Russia have greatly benefited.

372
00:37:33,579 --> 00:37:37,180
There has been a great boost worldwide in productivity.

373
00:37:37,180 --> 00:37:44,202
Doesn't mean there's not poverty in places, but uh as the world population has grown,

374
00:37:44,202 --> 00:37:45,763
These things have benefited.

375
00:37:45,763 --> 00:37:48,726
Now, we've also used that to punish people.

376
00:37:48,726 --> 00:37:55,261
We've punished people like Iran and Russia and China with our economic sanctions and they
don't like it.

377
00:37:55,261 --> 00:38:08,481
And so they have oh conspired, I guess you could say, to break out of that, you know,
American led rules based world economic order.

378
00:38:08,561 --> 00:38:13,407
And I've got an upcoming oh substack

379
00:38:13,407 --> 00:38:18,260
that I'll let you in on about should you be afraid of BRICS?

380
00:38:18,281 --> 00:38:26,848
Well, BRICS is an acronym, B-R-I-C-A-S, uh Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South
America.

381
00:38:26,848 --> 00:38:29,210
But it's many more nations than that now.

382
00:38:29,210 --> 00:38:32,843
I've forgotten it was 10 or 15 nations that are involved in it now.

383
00:38:32,843 --> 00:38:40,259
And what they want to do is break out of using the American currency as the world reserve
currency.

384
00:38:40,259 --> 00:38:43,573
They want to break out of the exchange system.

385
00:38:43,573 --> 00:38:51,101
uh And so uh if we place economic sanctions on them, uh they won't be affected about it.

386
00:38:51,101 --> 00:38:58,799
And that movement is growing and unfortunately what Donald Trump has been doing actually
enhances that.

387
00:38:59,941 --> 00:39:06,164
We don't hear a whole lot about, like you said at the beginning, what's going on in other
countries.

388
00:39:06,164 --> 00:39:29,193
ah When I think back over the first hundred days, it almost seems to me that Trump used
the tariffs to create a bad economic situation.

389
00:39:34,011 --> 00:39:35,783
for a number of countries.

390
00:39:35,945 --> 00:39:45,081
But the real goal, as I see it, ah is that he was doing it.

391
00:39:46,673 --> 00:39:51,493
to enrich his fellow billionaires and himself.

392
00:39:51,953 --> 00:40:02,273
Because all of a sudden, we go from 145 % tariff, oh, 80 % is fine.

393
00:40:03,393 --> 00:40:05,433
Just picks it out of the blue.

394
00:40:05,433 --> 00:40:08,313
The stock market goes up over a thousand points.

395
00:40:09,033 --> 00:40:11,373
People make millions of dollars.

396
00:40:12,193 --> 00:40:16,053
I didn't make millions, but I did okay on that day.

397
00:40:16,771 --> 00:40:19,438
and the days subsequent to that.

398
00:40:21,337 --> 00:40:38,408
And I sometimes wonder if that was not his real purpose, if he could create an economic
situation bad enough that the stock market would go down and then everybody that's got

399
00:40:38,408 --> 00:40:41,949
funds left buys on the so-called dip.

400
00:40:42,390 --> 00:40:47,833
And then he just picks a number out of the air and stock market goes crazy.

401
00:40:49,354 --> 00:40:55,086
You know, Jim, I think that as time goes on, we learn more about that.

402
00:40:55,086 --> 00:41:03,298
There may be some serious allegations about market manipulation, uh insider trading on
that.

403
00:41:03,298 --> 00:41:06,379
I don't have enough information on that right now.

404
00:41:06,379 --> 00:41:15,017
It does seem suspicious to me that, you know, he suggested one night uh that people ought
to put their money in the stock market.

405
00:41:15,017 --> 00:41:19,636
And the next morning, he retards the

406
00:41:19,636 --> 00:41:21,547
tariffs and so the market shoots up.

407
00:41:21,547 --> 00:41:29,320
uh But I do think that he doesn't really know what he's doing.

408
00:41:29,320 --> 00:41:33,562
you can look, you can, so I don't know if he actually had a principal in there.

409
00:41:33,562 --> 00:41:37,613
He has been, apparently been a believer of tariffs for a long time.

410
00:41:37,613 --> 00:41:49,498
uh And that takes us, you know, back to a Republican party that existed during and before
the Hoover administration and was proven to be wrong.

411
00:41:50,688 --> 00:41:58,513
and he's got as his principal economic advisor, Peter Navar, who is a charlatan.

412
00:41:59,315 --> 00:42:16,087
and, you know, when he wrote his, his book on, uh, it had a convicted felon and, and, he
wrote his book on, about tariffs, how, how good tariffs he, he referenced an authority on

413
00:42:16,087 --> 00:42:16,787
it.

414
00:42:16,868 --> 00:42:19,910
That was him that he made up.

415
00:42:20,064 --> 00:42:26,076
So that's the level of integrity of academic and intellectual integrity that's advising
the president.

416
00:42:26,076 --> 00:42:32,218
And you know, there's clearly internal friction about this with his treasury secretary.

417
00:42:32,218 --> 00:42:38,290
And not that I would trust Elon Musk, but Elon Musk doesn't like his economic things.

418
00:42:38,290 --> 00:42:43,021
And so all of this is based on very bad economics.

419
00:42:43,021 --> 00:42:46,592
know, Adam Smith, so the wealth of nations, this is...

420
00:42:46,592 --> 00:42:49,404
you know, kind of the beginning of modern economics.

421
00:42:49,404 --> 00:42:54,787
And it was, he promoted free trade, basically low tariffs.

422
00:42:54,787 --> 00:42:56,308
He didn't say no tariffs.

423
00:42:56,308 --> 00:43:09,485
He thought that they could be used, you know, incrementally if you've got an internal tax
on stuff that's being made here uh and something else is being imported, well, you could

424
00:43:09,485 --> 00:43:12,297
have a tariff on that to kind of level the playing field.

425
00:43:12,297 --> 00:43:14,132
But, um

426
00:43:14,132 --> 00:43:19,185
What Trump is doing so far outstrips that and shocking the system.

427
00:43:19,185 --> 00:43:25,448
He may have thought that this is the way you do it, like you're buying a building or
something like that.

428
00:43:25,448 --> 00:43:30,331
Someone wants to buy your building, you quote an outrageous price and then you bring it
down.

429
00:43:30,331 --> 00:43:32,592
But it has shocked the world system.

430
00:43:32,872 --> 00:43:41,437
And I think he's going to find that regardless of what the start market does, oh the world
economy is going to suffer for months, if not years.

431
00:43:41,717 --> 00:43:43,258
And that goes to

432
00:43:43,411 --> 00:43:45,132
our economic power.

433
00:43:45,132 --> 00:43:48,623
You know, um we have to have the money.

434
00:43:48,623 --> 00:43:55,256
We have to be generating the economy to afford a military, a diplomacy, to do all the
things we want to do.

435
00:43:55,256 --> 00:44:01,969
There's a lot of stuff that goes into economic power that's more than just Wall Street,
which is all he seems to understand.

436
00:44:01,969 --> 00:44:06,300
And that includes, we need to have a workforce that's healthy.

437
00:44:06,300 --> 00:44:10,784
So there's all these cutbacks to Medicaid, all these cutbacks to

438
00:44:10,784 --> 00:44:16,522
to the things that give us a good education, that hurts our economic power.

439
00:44:16,522 --> 00:44:19,856
And again, it could last for a long time.

440
00:44:20,337 --> 00:44:39,617
It also hurts our influence around the world, be it HIV treatments or any number of
nonprofit organizations throughout Africa and the rest of the world that, yes, they are,

441
00:44:39,617 --> 00:44:40,939
including some in Afghanistan.

442
00:44:40,939 --> 00:44:42,011
angry.

443
00:44:43,835 --> 00:44:44,698
What do you think about the...

444
00:44:44,698 --> 00:44:45,149
Go ahead.

445
00:44:45,149 --> 00:44:46,520
uh

446
00:44:46,520 --> 00:44:49,647
they feel betrayed, they are also angry.

447
00:44:49,689 --> 00:44:51,974
So yeah, Jim.

448
00:44:52,079 --> 00:44:52,961
What do you think about?

449
00:44:52,961 --> 00:44:54,153
ah

450
00:44:56,753 --> 00:45:02,661
is sending or repealing the...

451
00:45:04,473 --> 00:45:17,250
immigration status of the Afghans, Afghanistan's that we got out of Afghanistan because
they were helping the Americans and they would have been probably executed.

452
00:45:17,271 --> 00:45:20,414
And now he says Afghanistan's safe enough.

453
00:45:20,414 --> 00:45:22,237
They all need to go back home.

454
00:45:23,079 --> 00:45:23,360
Yeah.

455
00:45:23,360 --> 00:45:25,321
So that'd be an option for them.

456
00:45:27,746 --> 00:45:28,856
to do what?

457
00:45:28,866 --> 00:45:30,710
to stay here or go home.

458
00:45:32,156 --> 00:45:38,149
No, I mean, oh once again, we give our word, uh we ought to follow up on it.

459
00:45:38,149 --> 00:45:46,414
uh And uh there were still some people of Afghanistan that I think we should have gotten
out if we could have.

460
00:45:46,414 --> 00:46:00,701
uh There were a lot of the 21st century American military decisions have been made by our
political leaders, which is as it should be.

461
00:46:00,797 --> 00:46:06,159
but it has been a history of adventurism, which Trump says he's against.

462
00:46:06,559 --> 00:46:09,400
And I appreciate a restraint on that.

463
00:46:09,400 --> 00:46:15,663
uh But uh we shouldn't have ever been in Iraq.

464
00:46:16,543 --> 00:46:18,197
That was totally engineered.

465
00:46:18,197 --> 00:46:24,806
I appreciate and applaud the actions of our troops that were there.

466
00:46:25,317 --> 00:46:30,833
I applaud the actions of our troops in Afghanistan, but we should...

467
00:46:30,833 --> 00:46:32,555
We shouldn't have stayed as long as we did.

468
00:46:32,555 --> 00:46:38,679
We lost focus on going after Al-Qaeda as we went into Iraq.

469
00:46:39,501 --> 00:46:43,164
Once we got Osama bin Laden, we should have evaluated.

470
00:46:43,164 --> 00:46:53,133
And one of the things that America has failed on in the past is this concept of creating
democracies and things that are like America.

471
00:46:53,133 --> 00:46:55,515
we've had some success.

472
00:46:55,515 --> 00:46:57,676
We had success in South Korea.

473
00:46:58,057 --> 00:47:00,559
South Korea didn't start off as a democracy.

474
00:47:00,559 --> 00:47:09,923
It started off almost like a military dictatorship that evolved over time into the
democracy that it is right now.

475
00:47:10,224 --> 00:47:12,251
But it didn't work in Vietnam.

476
00:47:12,251 --> 00:47:14,786
It hasn't worked in a lot of other countries.

477
00:47:14,946 --> 00:47:23,951
And so I think America has to understand what the limitations of making other countries,
nation building other countries into our own uh likeness.

478
00:47:23,951 --> 00:47:26,473
And therefore the decision was correct.

479
00:47:26,473 --> 00:47:27,336
The decision that

480
00:47:27,336 --> 00:47:37,033
President Trump made, that President Biden uh fulfilled of leaving Afghanistan because we
didn't have a purpose there anymore.

481
00:47:37,033 --> 00:47:41,637
uh The withdrawal could have gone better and there were some intelligence failures.

482
00:47:41,637 --> 00:47:54,031
uh And as with regard to the people in Afghanistan that helped us, we owe a duty to them
and we also always should uh uphold that because

483
00:47:54,031 --> 00:47:57,774
It won't be the last time that we need people in another country to help us.

484
00:47:59,096 --> 00:48:00,727
And that goes back to.

485
00:48:02,814 --> 00:48:14,327
all of the brain drain that you were talking about, losing federal employees that have
years and years of diplomatic service and histories.

486
00:48:14,327 --> 00:48:29,712
ah I forgot in the book I was reading, ah it was, I can't think of the name of it and it's
immaterial, but it goes back to, uh

487
00:48:31,608 --> 00:48:34,368
the second world war after it was over.

488
00:48:34,868 --> 00:48:48,568
And the United States wanted, the United States and the allies were interested in having,
for lack of a better word, spies to find out what the Russians were doing.

489
00:48:49,028 --> 00:48:54,808
But the only problem was we didn't have anybody that spoke German or Russian.

490
00:48:54,888 --> 00:49:00,528
So we ended up hiring Germans who we had just defeated.

491
00:49:01,900 --> 00:49:18,916
for quite a while, we got intel that we wanted to hear, not what was really happening, but
it was intel that we wanted to hear because we hired the people we had defeated and they

492
00:49:18,916 --> 00:49:20,497
gave us what we wanted.

493
00:49:20,798 --> 00:49:28,054
And it takes years to develop those relationships of trust and confidence.

494
00:49:29,622 --> 00:49:32,490
And you just can't do that overnight.

495
00:49:33,352 --> 00:49:40,125
Yeah, that's why I'm concerned about so many intelligence officers being uh dismissed uh
after World War.

496
00:49:40,125 --> 00:49:49,678
I mean, we didn't really have an intelligence service before World War II, other than army
intelligence and Navy intelligence.

497
00:49:49,678 --> 00:50:00,343
And so the central intelligence agency was, you know, outgrowth of the office of special
services, but yeah, it was fledgling and mistakes were made.

498
00:50:00,343 --> 00:50:01,033
then

499
00:50:01,255 --> 00:50:11,271
Then Alan Dulles got a uh hold of it and some real hubris and American adventurism around
the world occurred.

500
00:50:11,271 --> 00:50:16,755
Our intelligence service now is tremendous uh and it should be supported.

501
00:50:16,755 --> 00:50:19,516
And it goes to the talk about people being dismissed.

502
00:50:19,516 --> 00:50:25,920
I'm very concerned even today hearing about another 120 generals and admirals being
dismissed.

503
00:50:25,920 --> 00:50:27,111
uh

504
00:50:27,111 --> 00:50:42,255
To me, this is a follow on of Senator Tuberville's disastrous hold on military promotions,
which it affects the military, but it also affects military families, transfers, people

505
00:50:42,255 --> 00:50:47,860
that have kids in schools, that now they're held there, they're interrupted in the middle
of the year.

506
00:50:47,860 --> 00:50:51,984
And it's just a disrespect for our men and women in uniform.

507
00:50:51,984 --> 00:50:53,489
I, they're...

508
00:50:53,489 --> 00:50:59,252
there does not seem to be a military or national security purpose in any of it.

509
00:50:59,392 --> 00:51:08,557
And to, you can't go into General Motors or IBM and hire a new Admiral or General, you
have to grow them.

510
00:51:08,678 --> 00:51:17,082
And um so when those are dismissed, to me, that is like millions of dollars of investment
that's gone.

511
00:51:17,082 --> 00:51:20,174
And it is a disruption because there is a progression.

512
00:51:20,174 --> 00:51:22,365
We send, you know, our

513
00:51:22,489 --> 00:51:28,894
senior officers to the Naval War College, National War College, National Defense
University.

514
00:51:28,894 --> 00:51:42,924
We prepare them for very tough roles of leadership and a lot of that's getting interrupted
now and the people who are having to take up the slack, uh you know, may not be ready for

515
00:51:42,924 --> 00:51:44,545
that particular role exactly.

516
00:51:44,545 --> 00:51:48,708
Now, is there a reason to downsize?

517
00:51:48,708 --> 00:51:50,199
You can do that.

518
00:51:50,538 --> 00:51:52,479
We did it in the 1990s.

519
00:51:52,479 --> 00:51:56,680
You have congressional hearings, you have study committees, you figure out where you can
do it.

520
00:51:56,680 --> 00:52:02,623
But just to rate people out means that some things are not going to be done, some things
are going to be lost.

521
00:52:02,623 --> 00:52:16,188
And that's another situation where we may not see what the problem is today or this year
or next year, but it may be a problem in the future that can be traced back to the ways

522
00:52:16,188 --> 00:52:17,729
he's treating that.

523
00:52:17,729 --> 00:52:19,293
So, uh

524
00:52:19,293 --> 00:52:24,633
And I'm very concerned about that and the dismissal of so many people from the federal
government.

525
00:52:24,633 --> 00:52:29,533
A lot of them will be in the Department of Defense if we were going to downsize.

526
00:52:29,533 --> 00:52:33,253
Now, let me praise a couple of things that are going on.

527
00:52:33,293 --> 00:52:39,853
Our Senator Wicker, who I do not always agree with, is promoting a larger defense budget.

528
00:52:40,173 --> 00:52:44,533
He is promoting the Ships Act, a shipbuilding thing.

529
00:52:44,533 --> 00:52:46,045
You know, after we spent...

530
00:52:46,045 --> 00:52:57,745
five, six trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the first part of the century, money
for which we cannot claim that we have any additional national security right now.

531
00:52:58,285 --> 00:53:09,665
That money could have been going into Air Force jets, it could have been going into Navy
ships, revitalizing our naval bases around the world, protecting them for the climate

532
00:53:09,665 --> 00:53:10,925
change that's coming.

533
00:53:10,925 --> 00:53:15,185
So I'm glad to see that there's a recognition of that.

534
00:53:16,093 --> 00:53:16,893
support that.

535
00:53:16,893 --> 00:53:24,193
There's one other thing that I have to say that I think is a good outgrowth byproduct,
shall we say, of the tariffs.

536
00:53:24,333 --> 00:53:34,313
When the Chinese locked the door on exporting processed rare earths to the United States,
it's a huge problem for us.

537
00:53:34,313 --> 00:53:39,373
There's about 900 pounds of rare earths in an F-35.

538
00:53:39,373 --> 00:53:44,412
There's about 9,000 pounds in a submarine.

539
00:53:44,412 --> 00:53:45,883
And we need them for our cars.

540
00:53:45,883 --> 00:53:47,504
We need them for our cell phones.

541
00:53:47,504 --> 00:53:49,705
We need them for all of our manufacturing.

542
00:53:49,705 --> 00:53:55,478
And China has about 90 % of the processing power for rare earths.

543
00:53:55,478 --> 00:53:58,069
Rare earths aren't technically rare.

544
00:53:58,069 --> 00:54:02,551
They're very available, but they're only available in certain places of the world.

545
00:54:03,372 --> 00:54:09,925
We've got some, Ukraine's got some, and China's got some, but they have more of the
processing power.

546
00:54:09,925 --> 00:54:14,241
And so one of the things that I hope that does come out

547
00:54:14,241 --> 00:54:24,954
of all of this is that we really do revitalize our Western and American uh processing of
rare earths.

548
00:54:24,954 --> 00:54:26,844
That's a national security thing.

549
00:54:26,844 --> 00:54:28,565
We've recognized it for a few years.

550
00:54:28,565 --> 00:54:32,746
We've got one plant that's in Southern California.

551
00:54:32,866 --> 00:54:36,037
I think that they weren't finding it profitable to operate it.

552
00:54:36,037 --> 00:54:39,468
Maybe now we'll see that there is profit.

553
00:54:39,468 --> 00:54:44,313
Even uh Adam Smith said that there are certain tariffs that are

554
00:54:44,313 --> 00:54:49,060
you should have to protect industries that are vital to your national interest.

555
00:54:49,060 --> 00:54:50,761
And we need to look at that.

556
00:54:52,264 --> 00:54:56,759
The people who have fought against that for years and years is the Republican Party.

557
00:54:58,004 --> 00:55:00,197
You mentioned ah

558
00:55:02,891 --> 00:55:05,369
I'm trying, I lost my train of thought there.

559
00:55:05,369 --> 00:55:07,173
ah

560
00:55:09,119 --> 00:55:12,496
and I can't think of what it was, it'll come back to me.

561
00:55:12,496 --> 00:55:16,827
mention one other thing about economic power when we're talking about that just a minute
ago.

562
00:55:17,568 --> 00:55:33,432
So as Russia and China and the people that followed them pull away from what has been an
American and European led uh world economic system, and they start pulling out and

563
00:55:33,432 --> 00:55:37,593
flouting the World Trade Organization rules.

564
00:55:38,013 --> 00:55:42,054
One of the things we need to keep our eye on the fact is that we have more debt now

565
00:55:42,099 --> 00:55:44,060
uh than we ever have before.

566
00:55:44,060 --> 00:55:46,061
And it is growing at an exponential rate.

567
00:55:46,061 --> 00:55:50,072
uh I've forgotten exactly what it is this minute.

568
00:55:50,072 --> 00:55:56,165
You can look at the world debt, the American debt clock, but it's about $33 trillion.

569
00:55:56,165 --> 00:56:02,647
And so the Republican bill that I saw today says it's going to add to the debt.

570
00:56:02,647 --> 00:56:10,546
uh Right now, I think it's about 122 % of

571
00:56:10,546 --> 00:56:13,226
our gross domestic product.

572
00:56:13,546 --> 00:56:22,406
during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt boosted our budget to 100%.

573
00:56:22,406 --> 00:56:28,346
So there's 100 % debt compared to our gross domestic product.

574
00:56:28,346 --> 00:56:33,586
But he could do that because it was only 41 % before that.

575
00:56:33,666 --> 00:56:37,206
So we are at real risk there.

576
00:56:37,206 --> 00:56:40,186
And David, Jim, there's nobody.

577
00:56:40,242 --> 00:56:44,902
in either party that is actually proposing solutions to this.

578
00:56:45,022 --> 00:56:49,942
So the fact of the matter is that we are going to have to take budget cuts in some places.

579
00:56:49,942 --> 00:56:56,842
We are going to have to increase taxes in some places in order to address that debt.

580
00:56:56,842 --> 00:57:09,970
And if we don't, there is going to be hell to pay at some point because if that economic
system crashes, if we aren't able to pay our debts, what that means is people will start

581
00:57:09,970 --> 00:57:13,870
pulling money out of American treasury notes.

582
00:57:13,950 --> 00:57:19,610
And our borrowing will either become impossible or become so expensive that we can't do
anything else.

583
00:57:19,610 --> 00:57:24,710
And we've seen this happen to other nations and it has not looked good.

584
00:57:24,810 --> 00:57:31,010
You know, it took 15 or 20 years for Japan to come back from that kind of situation.

585
00:57:31,010 --> 00:57:33,210
So I'm very concerned about that.

586
00:57:33,210 --> 00:57:39,390
What we really need to have is a debt commit, bipartisan debt commission.

587
00:57:39,406 --> 00:57:43,036
that has real power and can propose things.

588
00:57:43,036 --> 00:57:49,090
That is not what's being worked on and it is one of the greatest threats to our national
security right now.

589
00:57:51,351 --> 00:57:53,342
Let me ask you about your students.

590
00:57:54,343 --> 00:58:00,925
Are you impressed with your students' education when you get them?

591
00:58:01,666 --> 00:58:07,829
Or are they lacking a global perspective?

592
00:58:08,860 --> 00:58:14,863
So I think that they're drawn from the American population.

593
00:58:14,863 --> 00:58:18,814
So they're smart, they're knowledgeable.

594
00:58:18,814 --> 00:58:26,128
And the thing that I'm encouraged about is that they're interested in international
relations and in national security.

595
00:58:26,128 --> 00:58:29,079
They wouldn't have signed up for the course if they weren't.

596
00:58:29,119 --> 00:58:34,061
So I find that they're uh eager uh and open to it.

597
00:58:34,241 --> 00:58:35,862
One of the things that

598
00:58:36,632 --> 00:58:47,730
interests me and concerns me uh is that occasionally their questions uh show the influence
of Russian propaganda.

599
00:58:47,730 --> 00:58:57,356
And that's not surprising because oh our information system in the United States, the
distribution of news has fractured so badly now.

600
00:58:57,356 --> 00:59:03,420
uh And we've heard Russian propaganda on the floor of the House and Senate.

601
00:59:03,420 --> 00:59:06,202
uh And we've had the

602
00:59:06,202 --> 00:59:11,666
Republican head of the intelligence committee complained about it.

603
00:59:11,666 --> 00:59:16,409
So, you know, I've gotten questions like, well, is Ukraine even really a country?

604
00:59:17,230 --> 00:59:24,475
Yes, it really is a country and it has been for decades recognized by the United Nations.

605
00:59:24,475 --> 00:59:35,492
and, you know, I've heard questions, you know, that would kind of blame the war on
Ukraine, which, you know, is ludicrous.

606
00:59:35,539 --> 00:59:44,224
So, and you know, my students are susceptible to reason, and so, you we've been able to
talk through those.

607
00:59:44,224 --> 00:59:54,069
But by and large, they are very interested, they have some information, and the thing that
gives me some hope is that we're giving them a boost on some understanding of national

608
00:59:54,069 --> 00:59:56,620
security for this next generation.

609
00:59:57,865 --> 01:00:05,448
I appreciate what you're doing ah because to me...

610
01:00:07,997 --> 01:00:15,660
a chief executive officer of a corporation is not the CEO because of what he does today.

611
01:00:15,840 --> 01:00:23,524
He's CEO because of what he is planning to do next year and two years out and three years
out.

612
01:00:23,524 --> 01:00:25,185
He's looking ahead.

613
01:00:25,185 --> 01:00:28,207
He's got other people that are worried about today.

614
01:00:28,207 --> 01:00:29,787
Today is already here.

615
01:00:29,787 --> 01:00:32,348
There's not much you can do about changing it.

616
01:00:32,569 --> 01:00:33,202
So...

617
01:00:33,202 --> 01:00:39,142
Yeah, you know, in this class too, it's not that it's partisan at all.

618
01:00:39,142 --> 01:00:46,102
matter of fact, what we're trying to teach is critical thinking, to look at hard facts,
make sure you're checking your sources.

619
01:00:46,102 --> 01:00:51,182
I mean, I'm teaching national security within the Center for Intelligence and Security
Studies.

620
01:00:51,182 --> 01:00:56,242
A lot of these students will go on to become intelligence officers or law enforcement
officers.

621
01:00:56,242 --> 01:00:58,082
We try to teach them critical thinking.

622
01:00:58,082 --> 01:01:02,642
So mean, we also look at the fact that the Biden administration made

623
01:01:02,642 --> 01:01:04,142
uh mistakes.

624
01:01:04,143 --> 01:01:08,945
I have an acquaintance, Jake Sullivan, who is the national security advisor.

625
01:01:08,945 --> 01:01:14,167
I think the Biden administration made mistakes in the way that it supported Ukraine.

626
01:01:14,167 --> 01:01:15,378
It was very tenuous.

627
01:01:15,378 --> 01:01:16,998
It was very cautious.

628
01:01:16,998 --> 01:01:23,251
The thing that was irritating to me is that they say, we're not going to give you air
defense systems right now.

629
01:01:23,251 --> 01:01:29,804
And they would delay and delay and delay because they were afraid that it was going to
create Putin's to go nuclear on.

630
01:01:29,810 --> 01:01:34,792
And then later on, they did give them the air defenses, they did give them the tanks, they
did give them the jets.

631
01:01:34,792 --> 01:01:42,936
you know, if those things had gone on earlier, uh we might not be at the juncture where we
are now.

632
01:01:42,936 --> 01:01:46,998
And so I think there were mistakes that were made on.

633
01:01:48,245 --> 01:01:55,511
I'm a little bit older than you are, so ah I remember Vietnam very vividly.

634
01:01:56,412 --> 01:02:06,921
But it seems to me that since the Second World War, we have made a number of commitments
of military support.

635
01:02:09,129 --> 01:02:17,244
And when push came to shove, we might have been there for the beginning, but we did not
stay.

636
01:02:19,889 --> 01:02:25,411
And I often have thought, who do I blame for that?

637
01:02:26,251 --> 01:02:36,934
Do I blame the military for not, for going in, but not having an exit plan before you
leave, before you even get started?

638
01:02:37,174 --> 01:02:45,717
Or is that exit plan something that Congress should develop so that...

639
01:02:46,751 --> 01:02:52,814
It's not all of a sudden one day, we declare victory and we're gone, but things haven't
changed a whole lot.

640
01:02:52,814 --> 01:02:54,278
ah

641
01:02:54,278 --> 01:03:05,181
Well, I'm not positive that Congress certainly uh should exercise its oversight authority,
which I'm afraid it has not always done a good job of lately.

642
01:03:05,181 --> 01:03:22,036
uh And we do enjoy in the United States, uh civilian control of the military, something
that uh was given to us by George Washington, that concept when he handed in his

643
01:03:22,036 --> 01:03:22,646
commission.

644
01:03:22,646 --> 01:03:24,266
uh

645
01:03:24,403 --> 01:03:29,345
to the Continental Congress sitting at that point in Annapolis after he'd won.

646
01:03:29,486 --> 01:03:33,118
And uh if his name had been Napoleon, it would have been very differently.

647
01:03:33,118 --> 01:03:35,829
It was a very Cincinnati type thing to do.

648
01:03:35,829 --> 01:03:42,323
So civilian control, but that means that civilians need to understand the employment of
military power.

649
01:03:42,323 --> 01:03:51,117
And one of the things that I think is problematic is that we think that military is the
only solution or the first solution.

650
01:03:51,117 --> 01:03:52,778
uh

651
01:03:53,116 --> 01:03:54,727
And that's why it brings us back to dime.

652
01:03:54,727 --> 01:04:02,011
It's those other uh elements of international power that should come first and should be
developed.

653
01:04:02,011 --> 01:04:05,423
uh And so that we don't have to use military power.

654
01:04:05,423 --> 01:04:07,854
And the military has definitely made mistakes.

655
01:04:08,094 --> 01:04:15,479
And the military will tell you that is one of the aspects of war is that there will be
mistakes.

656
01:04:15,479 --> 01:04:22,282
so Eisenhower said plans are useless, but planning is everything.

657
01:04:22,362 --> 01:04:26,525
planning process gives you options for when things go wrong.

658
01:04:26,642 --> 01:04:38,794
So we have a lot to answer for, but ultimately our decisions about when to employ the
military are made by our civilian leaders and that's as it should be.

659
01:04:39,770 --> 01:04:42,852
Guys, this has been great.

660
01:04:42,852 --> 01:04:51,748
ah As we close out, Jamie, any final words of wisdom, anything else that you want to share
with us?

661
01:04:52,550 --> 01:05:06,087
Well, the thing that I would encourage is uh for people to keep up with not only what's
going on in the headline news, but if America is a world leader, then our citizens need to

662
01:05:06,087 --> 01:05:10,340
be kept informed of what's going on around the world.

663
01:05:10,340 --> 01:05:21,250
And then understand that the elements of national power also include the education of our
people, the nutrition of our people, the medical care of our people.

664
01:05:21,250 --> 01:05:22,588
And one other thing I would

665
01:05:22,588 --> 01:05:25,001
just on the medical care aspect of it.

666
01:05:25,001 --> 01:05:35,191
World War II, oh the reason that a lot of people weren't able to serve in the military
because they were malnourished uh in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, one of the reasons we

667
01:05:35,191 --> 01:05:39,435
couldn't call up the people that we needed is because they had dental problems.

668
01:05:39,435 --> 01:05:46,442
So, you know, that's just an indication that the general health of the population does go
to our overall national security.

669
01:05:47,184 --> 01:05:50,681
Thank Jim, last words from you.

670
01:05:52,804 --> 01:05:55,678
Come fly in my beautiful new airplane.

671
01:05:57,321 --> 01:06:06,021
I guarantee you, the Admiral and want nothing to do with your $400 million aircraft.

672
01:06:06,832 --> 01:06:11,819
Well, I haven't accepted it yet because I don't know what the taxes are going to be that I
got to pay.

673
01:06:13,277 --> 01:06:16,398
Don't worry about it, Jim, you can carry that.

674
01:06:17,339 --> 01:06:18,639
That's no big deal.

675
01:06:18,639 --> 01:06:32,625
ah I do want to uh invite everyone uh to take a look at JB's Op-Ed opinion aided by facts
on substacks.

676
01:06:32,625 --> 01:06:38,107
uh I do want to thank our oh sponsors.

677
01:06:38,107 --> 01:06:40,808
I do want to thank our subscribers.

678
01:06:42,761 --> 01:06:53,639
oh Please, if you have any questions, comments on this, uh send us an email at
mississippehappeningsofone.gmail.com.

679
01:06:53,639 --> 01:06:58,593
That's mshappeningsofone.gmail.com.

680
01:06:58,593 --> 01:07:08,920
uh We'd love to hear from you and once again, may we never become indifferent to the
suffering of others.

681
01:07:08,920 --> 01:07:10,121
Thanks guys.