Journalist John Basil Utley talks about the anti-Communist legacy of his mother Freda, who lost China, his post-Cold War break with the pro-empire “conservative” movement, the Armageddon Lobby and some of the possible consequences of a war against Iran.

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative and Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. A former correspondent for Knight Ridder in South America, Utley has written for the Harvard Business Review on foreign nationalism and was for 17 years a commentator on the Voice of America. He is director of Americans Against World Empire.

The Independent Institute’s Anthony Gregory discusses the Left, Right, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, war and a State out of control.

Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute, a public policy research organization that analyzes government policy and suggests nonpartisan, peaceful, free-market solutions to today’s social and political ills. He is also a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation, a guest editor for Strike the Root, and a columnist for LewRockwell.com.

Here’s some of what I would have said if I were smarter:

“Corporate liberalism functions via a façade of opposition between a purportedly progressive statocracy and a purportedly pro-market plutocracy. The con operates by co-opting potential opponents of the establishment; those who recognise that something’s amiss with the statocratic wing are lured into supporting the plutocratic wing, and vice versa. Whenever the voters grow weary of the plutocracy, they’re offered the alleged alternative of an FDR or JFK; whenever they grow weary of the statocracy, they’re offered the alleged alternative of a Reagan or Thatcher. Perhaps the balance of power shifts slightly toward one side or the other; but the system remains essentially unchanged. (Which explains, for example, why the recent much-trumpeted power shift in Congress has resulted in precious little policy change.)

“Alas, just as the insights of the 19th century were largely lost by the 1920s, so the insights of the 1960s seem to have become largely lost by the 1980s. Probably Reagan indeed played a crucial role in sowing confusion once more, this time by wrapping fascism in libertarian rhetoric just as the Progressives and FDR had wrapped fascism in leftist rhetoric. In any case, many libertarians today (sometimes even professed followers of Rothbard) have gone back to thinking of business as a persecuted minority to be defended against the creeping “socialism” of the regulatory state, while many on the left (sometimes even professed anarchists, like Noam Chomsky) look to the federal government as a bulwark against so-called “laissez-faire” and indulge in nostalgia for the New Deal.”

Here’s more.

Thanks Anthony.

I will be interviewing Erping Zhang, Director of the Association for Asian Research in New York City. His research focuses on China’s political economy, foreign policy, social change, and human rights issues. The former Kennedy School of Government Mason Fellow will be discussing the Falun Gong.  Tune into BlogTalkRadio at 4:30 PM Pacific.

Hat tip to Steve C.

Also, Brian Doherty and I are snarky anti-war jerk offs at Freedom’s Phoenix.

to have to root for the Rockefellers. Blog entry by Lew Rockwell:

“The Eastern Establishment Is Pro-Peace

Well, not quite, but the Rockefeller-neocon split continues. I hate to agree with the Trilateral Commission types, but the more conservative warmongers and imperialists are right to see the neocons as insane. The Rockfellers opposed the 2nd Iraq war, or at least the regime-change part, and now oppose the planned war on Iran as possibly leading to an economic calamity (the dead don’t much bother them). The Iraq Study Group was intended to be a shot across the neocons’ bow, but it had little effect. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s startling testimony against this war and the new one has been ignored by the court media.

“Bill Clinton was the last Rockefeller president, and now he looks pretty good in comparison to Bush. Bush’s own heritage is pure Rockefeller, since his grandfather Prescott, but he fell in with worse companions. (Thanks to Kev Hall for the link.)

“PS: On the pro-peace question, I should note that the Eastern Establishment helped promote, and mightily profited from, US entry into WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, among other adventures.”

Not so fast, says Anthony Gregory:

“Re: The Eastern Establishment

Lew, the Establishment seems to oppose the neocon insanity because it jeopardizes the US empire and has already ruined its post-WWII reputation worse even than Vietnam — which is the only silver lining of the Bush administration.

I think they want to clean up. I think the Anglo-American establishment and the neocons, while they disagree now, will agree once again when the time is right. Or, the next Rockefeller takeover, if it happens, will make us miss the days when the realists actually opposed intervention.

The neocons love the World Wars and Cold War, and so do the realists and Rockefellers. I fear that those who have their influence in both camps see some long-term, globalist Hegelian benefit from this supposed split. (Not to mention those in the military industrial complex who, in the short term, benefit from war no matter who wages it.) Isn’t it possible? Or do you think the split is real?

Me: Lew’s right, the split over Iran has to be real. Quote the mouth of David Rockefeller:

“If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.”

It must be an emergency for Zebigniew Brzezinski to be saying such things in open hearings before the Imperial Senate. (Not that everyone doesn’t already know that governments resort to such things all the time and always have.)

Let’s just hope that a silver lining to all this madness will be the death of the golden goose - the American Empire - for all these factions without any more destruction here in the States or in U.S. colonies overseas. Let these idiots fight over their country club privileges and leave us alone.

High Noon, Texas Time.

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