AUGUST, 2020 PART I
BILL SIMPICH: [Reading] “No later than six-months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such an emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint-resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated.” And that was a proposal written up in 2002 by Dan (Hamburg) and by Peter Scott.
PETER DALE SCOTT: No. 2009, when Obama was elected.
BILL SIMPICH: 2009. Okay. Good.
PETER DALE SCOTT: You read the statute.
BILL SIMPICH: That’s what I just read, the statute. I thought it was simple and direct. I like the language.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Okay. Well, Bill, you’re the chair, we’ll go wherever you go.
BILL SIMPICH: Well, let me ask you an easy question, what got you and Dan Hamburg going on the notion of writing this statute in the first place?
PETER DALE SCOTT: Well, I wrote The Road to 9/11, and focused very much on not just the implementation of COG but the fact that it had been planned in a secret and semi-private group that involved both Rumsfeld and Cheney even though both of them were not in the government at all, but chairmen of big corporations, one Pharma (Gilead Sciences, Inc.) and one petroleum, Halliburton. And then the two men who had planned it implemented it on the day of 9/11, and a lot of what they implemented really affected in a very negative way what happened. For example, this is one of my last things I ever wrote about, that Cheney used the separation provisions to keep (U.S. Attorney General John) Ashcroft out of Washington, and when he came to Washington directed him not to go to the Justice but to go to the FBI office, and that left free for him and his sidekick, (David) Addington, to deal directly with John Yoo (Office of Legal Counsel, DoJ), who was, you know, just a freshman, practically, but the people above him were in the Department of Justice building. So, it was a very manipulative use of COG provisions.
BILL SIMPICH: I want to get into the background of COG provisions, but let me follow up with your statement. What did Rumsfeld and Addington and Yu do in September that was so important?
[Repositioning of Professor Scott’s camera angle]
BILL SIMPICH: So, what’s your thought about how these three men got COG off the drawing board and actually implemented?
PETER DALE SCOTT: Well, I’d just add, first of all, they also used it to keep (President George W.) Bush out of Washington until 3:30 that afternoon. They had a free hand to do these things; I think, wasn’t (White House Counsel Alberto) Gonzales the White House attorney, that he was not consulted on these things? I don’t really know what they did because it’s all secret, but for a minimum, they suspended habeas corpus; a lot of people were directly apprehended and kept up to a month in some cases. It was terrible for Muslims during that month, about a thousand of them were taken in. At least one other important thing that we know about, and perhaps the most important thing of all, is that when Bush finally came back, then Cheney went off to live in the mountain which was the HQS for the Continuity of Government and spent, I think, with a staff of about 90, they were there for two or three months and produced, I believe – I’m only guessing but I think it’s a good guess – they produced the Patriot Act, which then turned some of the provisions of the COG into law.
DAVID TALBOT: Peter, let me interject a question at this point. You say a number of Muslims were rounded up in very harsh circumstances, but my recollection is that no members of the Bin Laden clan or any high-ranking Saudis who were in America at the time were arrested. They were all allowed to leave on a special flight back to Saudi Arabia as I recall. Is that correct?
PETER DALE SCOTT: Yes, and that was when there was an order that no planes were to fly, but an exception was made for a plane that’s carrying the Bin Ladens out of America. They were here for horse racing and the beaches of Florida, you know, having a good time. I don’t think they’re part of the conspiracy, these ones, in fact, I’m not sure that Osama had anything to do with it at all.
I do say, if we’re talking about this, I think there were levels of conspiracy here. I think the CIA had a special agreement with the Saudi intelligence which allowed Saudis to be in this country who were not what they appeared to be. If you want a benign explanation for that, that they were infiltrating the other Saudis, but two of them, famously, had just come from an Al-Qaeda meeting in Asia, and the CIA knew this, and they knew they were required to tell the FBI and they didn’t tell the FBI for about nine months until just shortly before 9/11 happened. So, there’s an awful lot to look at.
I don’t think that any of those planes were flown by Saudis and they may not even have had Saudis on board. I think the planes were controlled from the ground. Because we know that the technology… this was anti-terrorist technology was to control planes from the ground, and I think very clearly that’s what happened. And then, I think, there was maybe (Real Estate Developer Larry A.) Silverstein’s own conspiracy to have the buildings come down because he made billions out of that.
DAVID TALBOT: Who is Silverstein?
PETER DALE SCOTT: He had the lease on the buildings which were owned by the Port Authority.
DAVID TALBOT: Mmhm. One question: So, I edited a book, The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark, and you know Ray (Nowosielski), who wrote the book, co-wrote the book, and he documents in that book that, and his co-author (John Duffy), that several of the so-called hijackers were being tracked by not only the CIA but the FBI in the months leading up to 9/11. And, in particular, they focus on the San Diego cell (which) had very strong connections to the Saudi royalty.
PETER DALE SCOTT: I was going to say, funds were transferred… Prince Faisal, was the ambassador, and I think at least one of these people had met him personally, and funds were coming from the embassy to the man who appears to have been the control for these people in there, and who was simultaneously an FBI – well, I can’t say FBI agent – an FBI informant.
DAVID TALBOT: Right.
PETER DALE SCOTT: No. We don’t want to go through, I mean, anybody who studies 9/11 knows that a lot of the true facts about 9/11, very relevant facts are being actively suppressed; that the Commission Report was a cover-up; but the COG part which the Commission Report acknowledges in two different places; First of all, they acknowledge that it was implemented on that day, even before the emergency was declared, by the way; that took a couple of more days before that happened. But not only was it implemented, but that the Commission was not allowed to see the records of COG except for the chairman (Thomas Keene) and the director and one other person, oh, (Lee) Hamilton, the vice-chair; Keene, Hamilton and, what was his name, (Philip D.) Zelikow…
Bill Simpich: Zelikow. Uh-huh.
DAVID TALBOT: Zelikow.
PETER DALE SCOTT: …never saw, and the people who wrote the report, never saw; So, the most important, I believe, dimension of 9/11 was off-limits for the 9/11 Commission.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, I think the key question then is, do you feel, Peter, that the COG operation was set to go even before 9/11, and did 9/11 then give them a convenient excuse to implement COG?
PETER DALE SCOTT: Yes. I want to state that carefully because it doesn’t prove that they planned 9/11; it could have been just they’re waiting for a major terrorist crisis. That was the absolute focus; Terrorism was the new focus of COG planning which up until, I think, 1994 had been focused on an atomic attack. And then they, the New York Times wrongly reported, well, they misleadingly reported that they were no longer doing this planning. They didn’t say the second half of the sentence is, they’ve changed it to a new target which is terrorism. And it did continue, and Cheney and Rumsfeld, neither of whom were in government, continued to be key figures in planning.
They could have been just been waiting for something to happen, but because of other indications that the government behaved very strangely with respect to the hijackers, with respect to the number of games; a lot of the confusion was because there was a record number of war games, very relevant war games involving planes and involving the tracking of planes were all happening on the same day. We have tapes of the confusion in the FAA when they are trying to figure out what plane is which and is this a game? And the question is asked, is this a war game? No. It’s not a war game. But it is very strange that there were so many games on that particular day.
DAVID TALBOT: Do you feel that another area that makes this all somewhat suspicious is the government’s laxness? You know, Bush, of course, is warned by Condi Rice, I think, down in Texas on his ranch that we’re on Orange Alert…
PETER DALE SCOTT: Blinking Red.
DAVID TALBOT: That’s right, Blinking Red, that there’s some kind of imminent terror attack is being planned. So, it’s not as if the government, the White House isn’t being warned about this and yet they seem to be caught flat-footed on 9/11. So, at the very least, couldn’t you make an argument that the government was purposefully kind of lax? Strangely lax.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Yes. It was lax. Certainly, the Commission itself drew attention to the fact that they were supposed to be on an extremely high alert and there was no sign of that in practice. Another factor is that so many relevant people were not in the country: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs – I should say, not in Washington – Ashcroft was on his way to Milwaukee; A number of key figures who might have made a difference if they had been in Washington were just not there on that particular day.
DAVID TALBOT: So, the main movers and shakers then behind the COG implementation after (the attacks of) 9/11 are Cheney and Rumsfeld and their top associates. Is that correct?
PETER DALE SCOTT: Right. And neither of them was supposed to have been where they were. I mean, Cheney was supposed to have been in, what do they call it, the PEOC (The Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC, PEE-ock) is/was a bunker-like structure underneath the East Wing of the White House. It serves as a secure shelter and communications center for the President of the United States and others in case of an emergency), the bunker down below, and the Commission acknowledges that for about 15, 20 minutes he was somewhere else “making a phone call.” Well, I think that phone call was using the COG [Garbled; 16 second signal disruption] …was meant to conduct secret conversations that the rest of the government could not possibly hear, and I think Cheney was doing that. Rumsfeld was supposed to be either in his office or in the emergency room in the Pentagon, and for a half hour… well, the story is, and it’s true for a bit that he was outside putting people on stretchers; the country was under attack and the Secretary of Defense goes out into the courtyard of the Pentagon and helps people, puts people on stretchers? I mean, that is madness. What it really is, I think, is a cover for about 25 minutes of his time which is almost equivalent to Cheney’s unexplained period of time.
And then there’s the question of the president. The president’s plane in many accounts of what happened that day, Bush [Inaudible] was supposed to have been in a threat scare in Tampa where he was. The car allegedly drove at a high speed to the airport, they jumped off on the plane and the plane took off so before people even had their seatbelts on. But in fact, the plane sat on the ground in this context of a threat and the rest of it, just sat there. I think the three of them were talking; Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. And, you know, even if I’m wrong, the fact that we have all of these unexplained periods, and, nobody, you know; we had a commission who was supposed to be looking at these things and they managed to avert their eyes from what seem to me to have been the central facts.
David Talbot: Yeah. Bill, you jump in.
BILL SIMPICH: So, what I was going to ask, I’d like to go backward in time at some point on the COG, but do you think it’s important, Peter, that the Congress overruled Obama in 2016 with the JASTA (Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act) statute and basically said, you can go ahead and sue Saudi Arabia for what happened? I have always been kind of struck by that, but I’ve never been able to evaluate just how important that is.
Peter Dale Scott: In my view of things it’s a sideshow because I don’t think that Saudi Arabia was behind this; I don’t think that Osama (Bin Laden) was behind it; I don’t think that the hijackers are an important part of the narrative of what happened on that particular day. I can understand the frustration among the families, but I think maybe they’re suing the wrong government, frankly.
David Talbot: That’s intriguing. We have to follow up on that. If it’s not Saudi conspirators and it’s not the Bin Laden organization, then you seem to be pointing back at our country; I mean, they’re the only other players that you could say gained from this, people in our own government. Do you think this was some kind of clandestine operation coming out of the U.S. Government itself?
Peter Dale Scott: Yes, I’m not sure if we should really focus… If we’re talking about COG, I want to see that as a separate topic from the question of who is responsible for 9/11. But that’s not going to deter me from trying to answer your question. To me it’s very important to distinguish three different levels of, I guess, the word is conspiracy. I think that something quite legitimate but highly clandestine, even within the government, was going on between the Saudi intelligence and the CIA, and not even the CIA loosely, but the counterterrorism unit of the CIA under Richard Blee. And, they did things which the Commission didn’t properly investigate but other people have. They did things like suppressing information from the FBI about the movements of the hijackers, particularly, one of these hijackers, they had been picked up and observed in Malaysia at a highest-level Al Qaeda meeting, and two of them came to America. Immediately you should tell the FBI, and they didn’t. And, that sounds… I don’t see that as planning the destruction of the Twin Towers; I see that as protecting some kind of, not so much intelligence operation, maybe counterintelligence operation; that they were… at least, people were allowed in on the theory that they were going to investigate Saudi agents in America, some of whom may have been taken by Al Qaeda.
It doesn’t strike me that, unless these people were counterintelligence agents in Malaysia, then how could America know that? You know, from an American point of view, it seems very hard to explain how they could have let these people come in in the first place, and then not tell the FBI in the second place. Those are two big question marks. But, all of this doesn’t necessarily have to do with what happened on 9/11. It becomes, just like I think the government was doing weird things with Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy was killed, but it doesn’t mean that those things were part of the assassination plot.
But now you come to the question of, unquestionably, some of these Arabs were training to fly planes; that is a fact. But, it’s also a fact that they were terrible at it, and They were having trouble flying two seaters. And the idea that they were able to fly a 757, and particularly the one that circled the Pentagon before crashing into it. I mean, it’s like Lee Harvey’s shooting ability in Dealey Plaza.
BILL SIMPICH: [Laughs]
PETER DALE SCOTT: It’s something that… I shouldn’t have brought that in. But many pilots have commented on that this almost surpasses any pilot’s ability and certainly surpassed the ability of these Saudis. And that’s why, you know, using the Sherlock Holmes principle, if there’s nothing left, you have to conclude that something else was flying the plane. So, I think it was being controlled from outside the planes.
But even that, that’s a second layer of conspiracy and that one is criminal, of course. Criminal. But it didn’t have to have killed so many people. People could have planned for those planes to go in, and anyone who’s read Operation Northwoods plans, that was way back in the early ‘60s, where the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) were considering plans to kill people and blame it on Cuba. And here you had a situation where people were killed and it was blamed on Al Qaeda. But it didn’t have to be the huge numbers of people who were killed.
The fact that the Towers came down, I think, was probably not foreseen by the people who planned for two planes to fly into the Towers. The Pentagon, you know, it hit the part of the Pentagon that was relatively uninhabited, that also, intriguingly, hit the part of the Pentagon where they were looking into the three billion dollars that were missing from the… or is it three trillion, I think, actually… Excuse me.
BILL SIMPICH: That’s right.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Three trillion dollars that were missing in the Pentagon’s expenses and all those records burned up. Just like the Enron files burned up when the Building 7 went down in New York City.
So, I don’t think that the people who planned planes to go into the buildings had any idea that so many thousand people would be killed. That, I think, is a quite detachable conspiracy, that somebody who knows there’s going to be an attack on the building and they spent six weeks wiring the buildings with explosives; there’s physical evidence of this: nano-thermite and little balls of iron things that you can only explain that there was a high-level of explosion way beyond what happened with the planes. Just the photographs of the North Tower coming down and you see material being ejected thousands of feet. Not heavy material to provide the theory, which I think is a false theory but they can argue it, that it was able to bring down a building two buildings away, Building 7. That doesn’t happen when a plane hits a building; the building is supposed to go down, not to explode in all directions. But that’s what actually did happen. So, the third conspiracy is a conspiracy for the planes to crash and a lot of records to be destroyed and a lot of money to be collected by certain individuals I won’t name.
DAVID TALBOT: Let me ask, at the macro level, Peter, what you seem, given your other research, of course, going back to the Cold War, what you seem to be suggesting is that there is a thread, a dark thread, a deep state thread, maybe, that runs throughout American history, in our time…
PETER DALE SCOTT: Yes.
DAVID TALBOT: …that pushes the government and the country more and more towards a militant, repressive direction. And that the change of government is one major aspect of that. But today we’ve gone from a president who feared the military-industrial complex, although he enabled it, President Eisenhower, to a forthright, shameless, imperial presidency, as argued by Trump himself and Bill Barr as Attorney General. And this is a de-evolution of American politics, I think, that has been pushed by a hardline within American government: From Nixon to Reagan to both Bushes, to the Trump Presidency; and, you know, with the Democrats kind of aiding it and abetting it in different ways.
So, this is a pretty dark view of our history, and yet it explains why we’ve come to this very low point in our history as a country.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Let me take this in two stages: First of all, what was the state of the military-industrial complex at the time of 9/11 in 2001? I think it’s obvious Bush and Cheney were both part of the Project for the New American Century; they were absolutely set on getting U.S. troops into Asia, and the reason for that was that, and it’s so true, of course, that the belief then was the largest oil reserves in the world that were undeveloped were in central Asia in the so-called “Stans” that were liberated by the break-up of the Soviet Union. And I think it was 1992 that Chevron had signed a huge deal in Kazakhstan, and what’s the good of Chevron developing huge oil reserves in Kazakhstan if the only near-by army is that of Russia? There’s no defense. So, Cheney was the chairman of Halliburton that was involved in developing all these things; he wasn’t, you know, viewing from the sidelines; his company was very much involved in these projects. He wanted troops in Asia and he got them in Afghanistan which was done without too much rumpus. But to go into Iraq, you know; there was chaos in Afghanistan but in Iraq there was a strong army a strong leader in Saddam Hussein, and they knew that there would be a lot of opposition to that. And one of the things that was achieved by bringing in the national emergencies and so on is that they gained the control to deal with domestic opposition to a war campaign. And, so the short answer to the idea is that America survives by… We’re not a domestic economy anymore; we’re an economy living off the rest of the world and to be able to maintain that economy, I could go on and on about how it’s a petrol-dollar economy and oil, in particular, is what sustains the dollar. You have to be able to send troops and not be scared; they spent twenty years, not just the COG people but the whole Pentagon, overcoming what they call the Vietnam Syndrome. They didn’t want to be stopped in their tracks if they ever fought another major war.
So, what I think that they were, in the minds of the planners in 2001 is, we have to have the ability to control this country domestically, and if you look what happened in the wake of 9/11, they created Homeland Security. America is now a war-zone just like CENTCOM is a war-zone for central Asia, NORTHCOM is a military district to deal with North America and SOUTHCOM is to deal with South America.
The military now has the power to plan for and, if necessary, bring into operation things to control populations; Trump used this, for heaven’s sakes, in that crazy thing he did in Lafayette Square.
Now where you come to the paradox is that Trump seems to be outside that whole system. He seems to be, you know, putting in his own men to run the Pentagon as if he didn’t trust the Pentagon and so on. I don’t think that the Pentagon is the big enemy here right now; I think that Trump is. Trump people would like you to think that it’s Trump versus the deep state and I think that’s a very false picture of what’s really happening, and I’m afraid that some left-wing people have fallen for that a bit, but…
DAVID TALBOT: Well, my theory about this, Peter, and I actually gave a speech about this not long ago in Sonoma to the PRAXIS Institute, a peace group, and I think, and I think you agree with me, the deep state, such as it is, has metastasized out of all recognition from the way it was during the Cold War since 9/11. There are now countless agencies, private firms, thousands of people who have…
PETER DALE SCOTT: Outsourcing is a huge factor in this, and I spent a lot of time on outsourcing in my book, The American Deep State.
DAVID TALBOT: My point is that you can’t talk about a monolithic deep state anymore.
PETER DALE SCOTT: No.
DAVID TALBOT: I think where Trump maybe represents one wing of the deep state, certainly there are other national security elements that are very opposed to him, I think, for the reasons you’re, kind of, getting to. I think they think Trump is a rogue and he’s out further than they want to be; and he’s alienating our allies around the world; and he’s humiliating high-ranking members of the military, and so on. So, I think they think of him as a kind of an extremist. So, I’m saying that I think maybe it’s wrong to simplistically say it’s Trump versus the deep state, though Trump does represent some element and some zealous and fanatical element of the deep state when he pardons a war criminal like he did with this Navy Seal recently.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Right. And the Pentagon, of course, didn’t like that.
DAVID TALBOT: Yeah, I know. It antagonized the Navy hierarchy. But yet it empowered and kind of inspired the sort of hard-core, cut-throat elements within the military who cheered it and, of course, Fox News and all that. So, I think Trump represents some fanatical wing now of the deep state that’s particularly scary and dangerous, and yet, I think if he tried to stay in office after November, if he’s soundly defeated as I think he will be at the polls, I think he’ll be escorted out of the White House because I don’t think he has any wide support within the national security, and I think, actually the military, by and large, if you poled top and mid-level officers, you know, prefer Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s son died as the result of his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’s been an enthusiastic supporter of the CIA and the Defense Department throughout his career, Joe Biden.
BILL SIMPICH: Much safer way to get it done.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Can I answer all of that?
DAVID TALBOT: Yeah, go ahead.
PETER DALE SCOTT: I agree with almost everything you said, but I’d like to add two more elements. First of all, yes, the deep state is split; no, the country is split. We’re reliving the Civil War right now; loose ends from the Civil War are very much in the headlines, Black Lives Matter and so on. The Democrats are split, the Republicans are split, and the deep state itself is split. That didn’t begin with 9/11 though. The deep state itself has always been split and I write about this more than once. You know the John Birch Society, which was always treated as a fringe group in the main stream media, it came from an ongoing dissident element in the deep state that in the 30s was the National Association of Manufacturers which was much more nationalist than the internationalists and financial Council on Foreign Relations. A fight between the NAM and the CFR in the 30s was the fight between the Rockefeller republicans and the John Birch Society in the 1960s. And so, what’s going on now has deep roots in American History really going back to the Civil War, I would say.
And the second point is, you mentioned all this proliferation of people who are working in the institutional end of the deep state; I name names – [Laughs] I’m so old I won’t remember them – but one of the largest consulting groups in Washington; Can you help me here? They stay out of the headlines but they’re huge.
[Professor Scott refers to his book from the bookshelf behind him, The American Deep State]
DAVID TALBOT: We’ll come back to it, Peter. We can name it later.
PETER DALE SCOTT: We’ll name it later. And SAIC was the other one, they’re number two. These people are huge in Washington. They say 70% of the intelligence budget is outsourced. So, you don’t just think of the CIA but you think of all of these other… They’re usually CIA veterans who go onto much higher salaries, and then benefit from contracts which were awarded when they were still in government.
BILL SIMPICH: Like Booz Allen.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Yes! Booz Allen Hamilton. Thank you very much, Bill.
What has happened to wealth in America, as a result of what’s happened really since Reagan came into power, is that there is an immense amount of new wealth which is usually ideologically quite opposed to the old wealth. The old wealth lives within the laws, they make the regulations, they observe the regulations. And then you have firms like Amway that break the regulations and are fined $20 million dollars for breaking the regulations and Betsy DeVos ends up being the Secretary of Education because her father owned Amway. And I just did a study of the… Trump has no shortage of billionaires supporting him, but they’re all billionaires from the new wealth, marginal elements of the hollowed out American economy.
David Talbot: That’s important. Let’s talk about that then, Peter, because I think you’re right. There have been these key figures who represent the dark state, the deep state throughout American history during the period that you and I and Bill have studied it, and we can name them right now: Allen Dulles, of course, is high on my list.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Yes. Very CFR. You couldn’t be more CFR than Allen Dulles.
DAVID TALBOT: Very corporate; very Wall Street, but he connected Wall Street to the more militarist elements in Washington. And then, of course, you had, under Dick Nixon, you had Henry Kissinger, who played another key very dark role as a, you know, someone who operated above ground but also was doing a lot of clandestine things. Then, of course, under Reagan you had William Casey, who was a protégé of Allen Dulles as the head of the CIA. And he was, again, an ardent proponent of assassination as a political tool, and all sorts of other dark and dangerous things. And then you’re up to Dick Cheney in the George [W.] Bush administration. Now you have Trump; it’s such a shameless administration, as you say. It’s so unhinged that doesn’t even feel that it has to apologize. He came right out and said he’s for torture during the campaign. He had to be restrained by his Secretary of Defense, “Maddog” Mattis, who then got fired. So, this is obviously a very dangerous, reckless, extremist administration, and I think you’re right, its support, where does it come from? It comes from this new [Unclear] Carl Oglesby used to have [crosstalk] Yankees and Cowboys as the split within the American ruling class. But I think that kind of thing has become more complex now. I think, Peter, you’re right, its this new wealth stemming from the Reagan period. I say it’s often polluting wealth; they’re often oil and mining…
PETER DALE SCOTT: Yes.
DAVID TALBOT: … billionaires who are behind Trump. Gambling and casinos, which is certainly a kind of a criminal and fringe element of capitalism. New hedge funds, real estate, hotels, you know, that was Trumps bailiwick in New York where you have to deal with a lot of criminal elements.
PETER DALE SCOTT: You’ve named them all. You’ve named them all except fracking. Fracking is marginal petroleum development. If we start to cut back on petroleum consumption, fracking will be the first to go, and the traditional oil companies will still be there. So, the fracking money is definitely Trump.
DAVID TALBOT: Yeah.
PETER DALE SCOTT: And so it goes, you know.
Yes. I just wanted to add that it’s not just the people in Washington, or connected to Washington. The deep state, ultimately, is the wealth in this country. We came up with a constitution in 1787 that limited government but did not limit capitalism. And so, the capitalism is enormous now, and the government is sort of the play thing of different elements in the capitalist deep state.
[END OF PART ONE]