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Dec. 9, 2010 - InfoWars Special Reports
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20101209_SpecialReport-2_Alex
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Alex Abeya is the Cuban-born author of the book, Soldiers of Reason, the Rand Corporation, and the Rise of the American Empire.
He was allowed exclusive access in the Rand Corporation archives.
What he found was mad scientists, behaviorists, and hawkish generals who were intent on starting World War III and fleecing the American people on the way.
Once he was a skeptic of the subject of conspiracy theories in the New World Order.
But after his work with the Rand Corporation, he is now convinced that this top secret think tank has been pulling the strings of American government for at least 60 years.
Hi, I'm Alex Avella.
I'm the author of Soldiers of Reason, The Rand Corporation, and The Rise of the American Empire.
This was a book that came out in 2008, and it basically is a history of the Rand Corporation and its influence on American history, and basically, I guess, world history.
In a way, what I say in the book is that we're all the bastard children of Rand, and we don't even know it.
Originally, the RAND Corporation was an offshoot of the Air Force, which wanted to recreate the Manhattan Project.
As you recall, the Manhattan Project was when civilians and the military got together to create the atomic bomb.
After World War II ended, a general named General Henry Arnold wanted to make sure that that same combination of civilian scientists and military know-how got together just to be able to create new weapons.
They went on then to develop this particular organization, which is to be called eventually RAND, which stands for Research and Development.
Now RAND originally was supposed to be only To go into the theoretical things, sort of like developing plans for intercontinental ballistic missiles and to develop new weapons of destruction.
Ultimately, it expanded into other fields.
It expanded into social science.
It expanded into history.
It expanded, above all, into economics.
And it got to be so big that the Air Force had to spin it off.
They had sighted it over at Douglas Aircraft.
Which was one of the biggest aircraft manufacturers in the country at the time.
So in 1948, they spun it off.
Now, the reason why I'm talking about all this is because from the beginning of RAND as a separate entity apart from the Air Force, that is, as its own corporation, when it becomes the RAND Corporation, it's been intrinsically linked to the Ford Foundation.
If we're talking about the robber barons, if we're talking about people like Carnegie, about Ford, Rockefeller, well, yes.
I mean, there's been always a link between think tanks and the big, powerful economic interests.
Specifically, in the case of Rand, there's been a link between Rand and the Ford Foundation.
In fact, the attorney who drafted the Articles of Incorporation for RAND was the same fellow who later became the president, the first president of the Ford Foundation.
And they used to go around asking the people at RAND, are there any particular projects that you want us to fund?
Without Ford money, the RAND Corporation would have never gotten off the ground.
So from the beginning, there has been that intricate, that, you might say that Um...
That really intimate relationship between the two bodies, between the two ways of looking at the world, because after all, what you have here with the big economic interests is that they want to make sure that their own interests are protected.
They want to make sure their goods can be sold throughout the world, and they want to make sure that we have consumers for that.
And RAM, in a way, served as a very useful adjunct to that particular way of thinking.
The original title for my book was The Rand Corporation and the New World Order.
I did that on purpose, and I wanted to have people think about what those words actually meant.
Because what Rand actually did during the 1950s is that they came up with this particular way of looking at the world that changed everything, that changed the world we live in, that changed how we think, how we talk, The schools we send our kids to, how we pay our taxes, the planes we fly in, they've changed the whole world.
And that's what I'm saying in a way that we are the bastard children of Rand.
And what do I mean by all that?
They began the whole process of giving a ideological foundation to the process of deregulation
that would come to a head during the Reagan administration.
They developed something called rational choice theory that after it came up and after it
was developed and expanded, it turned us from citizens into consumers.
And instead of having rights and responsibilities, we became consumers with choices in a world
where what really counts is what they call the consumer sovereignty, the sovereignty
of the consumer, where what counts is not what we do or who we believe in or what God
we pray to, but how much money we're going to spend and what's in it for me.
Thank you.
In a way, it changed the whole physiognomy of America, and by extension, the rest of the world.
Obviously, my book deals mostly with the Rand Corporation, and the Ford Foundation is sort of like an offshoot of the whole thing.
But I do know that at the time that the Rand Corporation was founded, like I said, the first president of the Ford Foundation was one of the founders of the Rand Corporation.
And their goals are very similar.
Their goals were to have a world in which you have technocrats running everything.
Founders of RAND, one of the main intellectual luminaries of RAND, was a fellow named John Williams, who was the head of the mathematics department.
And he believed in preemptive nuclear attacks in the Soviet Union, and he believed in bringing about a one-world government.
one world government that would be run by technocrats like himself, by people who would
be following what he called the rule of reason, which would be all right if only that reason
was controlled by ethics.
Unfortunately, neither in the world of Rand nor in the world of that Ford Foundation at
the time was there much call for an ethical point of view of what our life is supposed
to be all about.
Instead, it was going to be a world in which efficiency was all.
In which men almost became substitute machines.
And if you look at the early history of RAM, matter of fact, that's one of the reasons why they went into the social sciences.
Because they couldn't figure out how to deal with people.
People are messy.
People are not rational, at bottom.
But, the people at RAM and the people at the Ford Corporation thought That humans are rational and that what guides our actions is self-interest.
Of course, you and I both know that's not the case.
We love our children.
We love our family.
We love our country.
Sometimes we're even willing to give our life for a fellow human being even though we may not know him.
Now all those principles are denied by the doctrines of rational choice theory that came out of Rand.
There's no place for that in the world view of both the Ford Foundation and the Rand Corporation at that time in the early 50s.
Humans are messy.
Humans are complicated.
Humans are both rational and irrational.
I believe at bottom we're all irrational and that we use rationality as a tool to achieve ends that in and of themselves are not rational.
Rational choice began as a way of countering Marxist doctrine.
You may not recall this, but at the end of the Second World War, in the late 40s, early 50s, there was a great deal of pessimism in the Western world.
People really thought that capitalism was going to die, basically.
That communists were going to win.
And that there was no way to stop the dialectical progress of humanity, so to speak, you know, to borrow some of the terminology of the communists.
That there was a certain way that history developed, and that all that we could do was, you know, bend our heads and say, okay, Lord, here we go.
That was not the case, obviously.
But, the United States had to come up with a theory that would legitimize the individualist
perspective on life that the United States has always had and that Western
civilization had.
So there was an economist named Kenneth Arrow that was hired by the RAND
Corporation to come up with what they call the utility function for the
Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union was a very closed society.
We had some spies.
We didn't have that much information about it.
Basically, Rand, as the think tank for the government, was given the task of trying to decide how would the Soviet leaders act.
In other words, what would Joseph Stalin do if, let's say, we were to invade Poland?
Or if we were to go into the Soviet section of Germany?
How would they react?
So, therefore, they gave him this particular Assignment, which is to assign what they call a utility function.
How would the leaders of the Soviet Union react given a particular crisis with the Western world?
So what Arrow did is that he took it from a perspective of a mathematician, and he assigned certain values to his research.
And he came up with this theory called rational choice theory, whereby he postulated that it's self-interest what drives people.
That humans are essentially rational.
That all humans think with the same kind of rationality.
That science is universal.
And that we're all in it for ourselves.
And that there's no such thing as religion, altruism, patriotism.
That self-interest rules all.
And that, therefore, what we should have is something called the sovereignty of the consumer.
That we should give people As many choices as they can, because according to his theory, if you have a group of four people, and there's more than two choices, there's never going to be a democratic decision, because one of the parties is going to impose his will on the others.
Now, I know to us that sounds like nonsense, because obviously we live in a democracy of what comes as close as we can to being in one, and we do believe in majority rule, but according to these axiomatic principles that Mr. Arrow developed, there is no such thing.
That there's always the tyranny of a particular party over another.
So therefore, in order to countervail that, and thus to countervail Marxist doctrine, he came up then with the theory of rational choice.
Rational choice then became the foundation for all the deregulation that happened during the Ronald Reagan era, and even before, during Carter.
Because after all, if people are only in things for themselves, then there's no such thing as a politician acting for the good of the country.
So, therefore, you know, it's all self-interest.
So, therefore, we have to do things in such a way that everybody will get the most benefit out of it.
Therefore, we have to deregulate things because we have to see what do we get out of this and it would be unnatural to expect people to actually give things to others because, after all, that's not what human nature is all about.
So, that became the foundation, you know, for deregulating industries and for basically the mess that we find ourselves in.
RAN, obviously, didn't just develop rational choice.
I mean, obviously, RAN was created to create new weapons of mass destruction, so to speak.
So they were extremely instrumental in the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
They were also extremely instrumental in the creation of the hydrogen bomb as well.
And, as the 50s went on, they were involved with NASA.
matter of fact, they were one of the first people to propose an orbiting earth station,
an orbiting satellite station around the earth.
And this, that was like the first project that they did, in fact, in 1946.
They were also involved, very heavily involved in the use of nuclear weapons.
Why is that?
Well, RAND was the creation of the Air Force.
The Air Force at the time was the golden child of the military services in the United States
because they were entrusted with the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb, and later the hydrogen
bomb.
Because they were transported by airplanes.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles had not been developed yet.
So therefore, Rand was involved in this brand new form of looking at warfare.
One of the first things that Rand tried to do was to come up with a theory of general warfare.
Like a theory of how warfare should be applied, what should be done, and of course, you know, It didn't work, because there's no such thing as the general theory of warfare.
There might be something like that in physics, but certainly not in war.
So therefore, that went by the wayside.
So therefore, what Rand began to do is to do special localized studies.
And one of the things that they did was called the Basing Study, which highlighted how the United States would have been susceptible to a sneak Soviet attack that would have destroyed our country basically, would have destroyed not only our
planes sighted in Europe with all the nuclear weapons, but they would have been able to
come in under the radar and just like the Japanese did in Pearl Harbor, they would have been
able to attack the United States.
Because of studies that were done at Iran, especially by one of its foremost researchers,
a guy named Albert Wollstetter, the United States Air Force changed the way in which
its nuclear airplanes were sighted and in which the bases were done.
And therefore, it changed the way in which nuclear bombs and nuclear weaponry were handled.
Not only that, they also developed a whole theory of how to utilize atomic weaponry.
You have to realize that the atomic weapon, the first A-bomb is dropped.
in Nagasaki in 1945, but nobody really knew what to do with it. I mean, when they dropped
the first bomb in New Mexico in Alamogordo, nobody really knew what was going to happen
with that bomb. Some scientists took bets as to whether the whole world would go up
in flames. They didn't know what was going to happen, whether a chain reaction would
begin and the whole earth would be destroyed. Obviously, it wasn't. But once that weapon
was developed, then they had to come up with a way of using that weapon.
Because after all, its power was immense.
They reused it twice in Japan, but would they use it again?
And if they reused it again, what would happen?
Rand, because he was basically the only think tank that was in charge of thinking about those things, came up with a whole theory of how to use these weapons.
Basically, then, it came up with the whole theory of second strike capability, which is that it really doesn't matter what the other side does to you, what matters is how bad can you injure them after you have been attacked yourself.
In other words, if you're able to survive the attack by your enemy, and you're able to counterattack, that's what really counts.
And thus a whole new nuclear strategy came about and that's because of RAND.
Iran was also instrumental in developing airplanes that were able to refuel the bombers that
would take off from the United States to bomb the different targets in the Soviet Union.
And again, that came about because of the Beijing study, because after the Beijing study,
all the planes that had been sited in Europe were moved back to the United States, and
then they had to develop a way of being able to refuel these planes in midair.
And thus they came up with the whole idea of refueling in midair with having another
plane bringing in the fuel and doing it like that.
So that's the other thing that Iran was involved in.
Other people that came out of Iran also changed what had been, I don't know, I mean, really
a...
a lunatic way of looking at the world because basically they had
the United States government had a plan that said, you know, we have a problem with the Soviet Union
because we don't have enough soldiers in Western Europe, we're just going to drop a bomb on them.
And we're not just going to drop one bomb, mind you, we're going to blast them all out of existence.
It was called the SIOP, the plan for basically blasting the Soviet Union to smithereens,
not only the Soviet Union but the entire Eastern Europe, the entire Warsaw Pact alliance and China for good measure.
So, there was a scientist that came out of round, his name was Dan Ellsberg, Daniel Ellsberg, who later on became very famous because of the Pentagon Papers.
And he was the one that was able to pressure Robert Magnamara and the Kennedy administration into
changing that operating plan and to make sure that if there was a
problem in Western Europe that we wouldn't just be going around and actually trying to wipe out the Soviet
Union.
The problem was that, and there's so much to talk about, is after all the Rand Corporation also had come up with
these plans and these What if scenarios?
That said, basically, you know, we can survive a nuclear war.
And that's what they did in the 1950s.
And that's why they were so closely tied into the development of what President Eisenhower later called the military-industrial complex.
Researchers at RAND really believed that as long as 10 million of us survived a nuclear war, that we had won.
Even if 90 million of us died, it doesn't matter.
Because the other 10 million would be able to survive, would be able to come up, and, you know, come out of their caves and mineshafts, and everywhere where they were being... they were taking shelter, and they would be able to recreate the world.
Of course, President Eisenhower, when he was presented with these plans, said, that's total nonsense.
As he said, there wouldn't be enough shovels to be able to scrape away all the dead that we'd have all over the country.
But, These people, who were allied with the Rand Corporation and with industrialists, who actually stood to make a lot of money out of developing these new weapons of destruction, kept pressuring President Eisenhower into increasing the Pentagon budget.
But Eisenhower cut it back.
So instead, what they did is that they went around and they picked someone who they knew would be much more malleable and who in fact would increase the Pentagon budget by a dozen fold and his name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
who was in a way a creature of the military industrial complex. One of the reasons why Kennedy
came into the White House is that he was going around saying, well we have a missile gap.
The Soviet Union has so many more missiles than we do.
Well, it was nonsense.
None of that existed, actually.
The missile gap was in our favor, which is something that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had to admit within the first few months after he took office, which is, you know, what we thought was there was not there.
And how did that information come about?
It came out of scientists at RAND.
Well, whether deliberately or not, fed that information to the Kennedy camp, so Kennedy would be able to go around and say, the Russians are going to beat us, the Russians are going to have our lunch, the Russians are going to destroy us, there's a missile gap, and they're going to wipe us out, which of course, was not the case.
So, it's a long and complicated relationship between the RAND Corporation and the military-industrial complex.
RAND researchers, to this day, Look down on the CIA.
They think they're amateurs.
They think they're fumblers.
They think they don't know what they're doing.
They think that just by going around and playing that spy versus spy that, you know, they'll be able to get control of the world.
These guys know better.
What you have in the Rand Corporation is the cult of reason.
The belief that reason can solve all problems.
That there is nothing That reason cannot mend or cure or improve.
I don't think that's the case and I think most of you probably don't think that either.
That's what they believed.
So, therefore, they think that the CIA is a whole bunch of fumblers of people who are amateurs who don't know what they're doing.
So, from the beginning, it's true that they cooperated with the CIA, and they did research that later on was utilized by the CIA.
A very famous example of that was the Viet Cong study that was done in the 1960s, a Viet Cong morale study that was commissioned by President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as to what motivated the Viet
Cong, which is the forces of natural liberation in South Vietnam.
You know, they gave this report to the federal government, to McNamara and to Johnson, and
they said, these guys are not motivated by reason.
These guys are there because they're patriots, because they want to have a better country,
because they really believe that they're being taken advantage of by the colonial powers,
and they see the United States as a colonial power, and they're willing to die for their
cause.
Nobody listened to that.
Rand was also involved in a number of studies in counterinsurgency as well.
They probably hosted the first conference on counterinsurgency back in the 1950s, and they were even advocating military coups in third world countries, thinking that again, if you have a small group of military who have been trained, hopefully in the United States, if not there, then in Europe, but people who believe in reason again, who believe in technological advancement, who believe that people can Let's be improved!
And the things can be ameliorated by the use of reason and by the use of American resources, that it was better to have the military go in and stage coups and therefore lift all these countries out of the quagmire of poverty and ignorance that they found themselves in.
And they hosted a number of conferences like that, in a way almost instigating these military to stage coups, which by the way happened later.
Happened in Peru, happened in Chile, happened in Brazil.
Obviously they were not directly involved, they weren't there Distributing the weapons to all these people, but they were certainly the intellectual parents of what happened.
I do believe that the national security apparatus that was established after the Second World War serves as an excuse to extend the power of the federal government.
Now, you have to realize, though, when you look at it from a historical point of view, that there's always been two countervailing tendencies within the United States, right from the time of the Founding Fathers, in that you had Hamilton and Jefferson on the other side, with, you know, Jefferson advocating federalism with The power being given to local communities, to gentleman farmers, to decentralized authority, and Hamilton on the other hand advocating a strong central government very much on the European model.
With Washington, most of the time, falling into Hamilton's camp.
So you have this constant back and forth, back and forth between the Federalists and the, lack of a better word, the Centralists, you know.
And it went back and forth up until the Second World War when, because of the menace that was The Axis powers and the way in which we defeated them by expanding the power of the federal government, and later on because of the menace posed as well by the Soviet Union, or at least the perceived threat of the Soviet Union, also expanded the power of the federal government.
And in a way, as many others have said, it just became an excuse.
An excuse to expand further and further the influence of the federal government in everyday affairs.
And that's a fact.
There's no denying that.
Rand was not directly involved in the setting up of the United Nations.
However, there were people who were involved in the setting up of the United Nations who then went to work at Rand.
I mean, one of the things that's interesting about RAND is not necessarily what RAND does as an institution, but what the people who work within RAND do and their influence within RAND and later on in the world at large.
I mean, I guess the most recent example of that would be Donald Rumsfeld, who He was chairman of the board of RAND before he became
Secretary of Defense under President George Bush.
As regards to the UN, you have to realize that a lot of the people that founded RAND
were actively advocating a one world government.
And they did believe that the United Nations served as sort of like a template for that.
But actually, they thought that there should be another organization that would actually supersede the United Nations.
An organization that would be directly controlled by the United States and that would serve as a world government.
And that's why some of the leaders, early leaders of Iran, such as John Williams, advocated preemptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union to make sure that the United States would be the only country in the world that had the supreme power, which is to say, nuclear weapons, to be able to impose its will on the rest of the world.
False flag attacks, obviously, are when one country comes up with a pretext for attacking another country.
In the United States, the most famous example of that is the Gulf of Tonkin and the total Gulf of Tonkin resolution, when President Johnson knew or suspected or should have known that the information that he was receiving about an attack by the North Vietnamese was totally false.
But yet he used that to be able to go to Congress and then to approve a resolution authorizing the deployment of American troops in Southeast Asia.
There's also the Northwoods report or incident, which is A proposal by the Pentagon to again use false flags to provoke the United States into invading Cuba in 1962.
Of course, that came out, that was proposed before the missile crisis of October 1962, so that actually never took place.
You know, I have seen documents in which that was one of the things that were proposed by Rand planners as among a slew of possibilities to be considered if and when it was necessary by the United States.
I've also seen the documents as well from the Pentagon as well, from the chiefs of staff
who were pressing President Kennedy to go ahead with the Northwood plan and, you know,
go ahead and just find a pretext to go in and invade Cuba.
So those are things that have always been taken into consideration.
You have to realize that what the Rand Corporation does is to come up with a whole slew of what-if
scenarios.
What will we do under this?
What will we do under that?
If this happens, what do we do then?
If that happens, what do we do in that case?
And they never stop to think, is that the right thing to do?
Bye.
There's a total immorality in the plans of an organization like the Rand Corporation.
A total immorality in their planning, in their thinking, because they're just there to propose alternatives.
They're not there to tell the powers that be, this is right or this is wrong.
Their excuse is that they're just not responsible for whatever actions these people actually will take according to the plans that they propose.
Of course, they know, or they should know, that when you're framing the argument, when you're saying, these are the different things that you can do, that therefore, you're giving carte blanche to any one of those things to happen, even though some of those may be ethically repugnant to most people on this earth.
such as, for instance, a false flag attacking another country under pretext,
because it's saying that person, that country attacked us.
Or authorizing torture.
Or so many other things.
Or even nuclear attacks.
I mean, when you have a plan that says, well, we should actually attack this particular city and that
particular city, because therefore we'll be eliminating half of the
population, and the other half then will die off because of nuclear
fallout.
And yet to pretend that that doesn't have any ethical consequences,
it's totally immoral.
And that's what I find objectionable in all the plans that are created by RAND, but not only by RAND, by most think tanks.
Because nowhere in the universe is there a moral compass.
Is there someone, somewhere saying, that is just plain wrong, and that's not what this country is all about.
And we, as advocates, and as thinkers, and as Americans, cannot stand for that.
Nowhere, in any of their plans, do you ever find that.
All you ever think of is utility.
Will this give me the result that I want?
Without thinking, is that the right thing to do?
And that's what I find totally objectionable.
Well look, what is the objective of the military-industrial complex?
The military-industrial complex obviously has to come up with a bogeyman, has to come up with an enemy, for which, or against which, we have to defend ourselves.
For a long time.
For a long time.
That was the Soviet Union.
Then after that, it sort of like became, well, maybe China.
And you can see that in the plans that Rand was coming up with.
And if you talk to some of the people at Rand, if you talk to, for instance, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N., he himself admits that there were a lot of plans being made about China being our next adversary.
Then, what happens?
We have 9-11.
The tragedy of 9-11, and all of a sudden then it became the Middle East.
Then we have to find a way to be able to deal with these adversaries that have come up.
People who before used to be our allies, all of a sudden are our worst enemies.
You know, Saddam Hussein, to whom we gave the weapons so he'd be able to fight Iran, all of a sudden becomes our enemy.
He invades a country after we have given him sort of like the green light to go into Kuwait, and he says, no, no, we can't do that.
And then we go in and we decide that he's the enemy, In other words, the military-industrial complex is always looking for an enemy so it can continue building more and more weapons.
So there's been a continuity in that ever since the Second World War.
What the military-industrial complex wants is to avoid, at all costs, a return to the 1930s.
I return to the 1930s not only because President Roosevelt was in power, during which more
money was spent on social services and on people than on weapons and on the Pentagon,
but because of demobilization that happened during the 1930s, because of the way in which
the Pentagon budget was slashed mercilessly, because after all, and with good reason, the
Russians said, we're not at war. There is no reason for us to spend so much money on
weaponry. And of course, they'd say, well, but that's how come World War II happened.
So after World War II, because of that, there's always been this desire to create an enemy for the military-industrial complex to be able to go back to the government, go back to the American people, and ask for more money.
We have enemies.
Our enemies are everywhere.
So, like I said before, first it was the Soviet Union.
Then when the Soviet Union collapsed, then it became China for a while.
Then it became Islamofascism, became Al-Qaeda.
Then it became the Taliban.
I mean, it's like this enemy keeps morphing.
Next thing you know, it's going to be your neighbor down the street, who all of a sudden is advocating something that is not kosher, that cannot be allowed.
And that's where we're heading.
So, it's just looking, it's like whack-a-mole.
It's like, where are we going to find it?
Because if it doesn't exist, it will have to be created.
The Tea Parties.
You know, my heart goes out to them.
Because I do believe that the federal government has grown far beyond what it should.
And I think more power should be given to local communities.
On the other hand, it seems to me that they're not really paying attention to where their real enemy is.
I mean, do we really need the kind of Pentagon that we have right now?
Who exactly are we fighting?
Why exactly are we in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires?
Why are we there?
I mean, let them fight their own floors!
It's true that we should have helped them, and sure, we could give foreign aid, but to have tens of thousands of our soldiers there exposing themselves for what?
To prop up a corrupt government?
That it deals in heroin, that then comes back to your own country?
What are we doing?
Yet, that has been alleged as the reason why we have to be there, because of some security reason.
So therefore, I mean, I see their point.
I see the point that the federal government has expanded, but they're being used.
They're being used in the sense that what we have here Again, it's a group of people that will manipulate others.
To whatever degree it can, to be able to, believe it or not, increase the budget of the Pentagon, to be able to have more weapons out there, to come up with another enemy, that will be able to say, that's the guy that we should be after.
I mean, for all we know, maybe then, the next thing we know, we'll be, I don't know, maybe we'll be landing in Nigeria, and saying, well, there's a rebellion out there that we're going to have to deal with, because they're going to take over all of Western Africa.
And all of a sudden, Western Africa will become then, A place of interest for American forces.
Because all of a sudden maybe there'll be uranium or plutonium or oil or something else that will be deemed international interest.
And then all the attention will be focused over there.
And in order to pay for that, then obviously we're going to have to get rid of Social Security, we're going to have to get rid of the Department of Education, we're going to have to get rid of regulations, the safety net that was instituted to benefit the people.
of this country in the 1930s by President Roosevelt.
Which to me makes, personally, it makes no sense.
So that's what I was talking about when I think that they're being misguided and they're being used.
It's true that we have debt.
It's true that we have to get rid of that debt.
And it's true that things have to be cut back.
But we also have to see where there are real interests lie, and who is our real enemy.
Sometimes I think that our real enemy is right here in this country.
Well, RAN itself has been called a shadow government.
I don't know if you're aware of that.
But even back in the 1950s, because so many people went from Rand to the government, the government back to Rand, back to the government, back and forth.
It was a revolving door.
ran as a harbor and as the cradle of the military industrial complex and as the birthplace of
the technocratic elite that wants to run this country has been involved in the creation
of a shadow government from the very beginning.
There's no doubt about that.
And it continues to be involved in that kind of thing.
I mean, a number of these security clearances have been issued to people who have been with
RAND in order...
I mean, to this day, 50% of the work that RAND does is for the federal government.
And a great deal of that is still classified.
Top secret.
Matter of fact, you can't even talk about it, because were we to talk about it, because of something called the Patriot Act, which I really appreciate the irony of that, we'd be put in jail for even mentioning it.
So let me just say this to that.
Yes, RAND has been involved.
Yes, RAND scientists and researchers and ex-government officials who then become government officials and then become RAND researchers and scientists are involved.
And yes, it continues.
And the only way we can get rid of that is by making people aware that their liberties have been taken from them, and that we have to stop this kind of nonsense, that we have to stop this revolving door of people going from think tanks into the government, from the government into think tanks, into the military-industrial complex, into companies that use their expertise in order then to lobby the Pentagon and to lobby the government for more weapons in order to then take money out of Social services out of things that should be helping the people in order to build this huge, this mammoth undertaking which is actually sucking dry this country.
We have to stop that.
Andrew Marshall is the head of the Office of Net Assessment.
As a matter of fact, he's been there since the 1970s, and every president since then has confirmed him to that post.
The man is 89 years old right now, and he's still at the head of that department.
I do believe he's the oldest bureaucrat still in office.
And he was one of the, I wouldn't say one of the founders, but certainly one of the He was an original scientist affiliated with RAM.
He was also a good friend with Albert Wollstetter, who is very prominently mentioned in my book.
After all, Wollstetter was the guy who came up with the concept of second strike capability, who was feeding all the missile gap information to the Kennedy camp.
Who almost single-handedly was able to turn around detente in the 1970s and to again scare the American people into thinking that the Soviet Union was actually more powerful than it really was.
But that was Albert Wall Sitter and Andrew Marshall was a buddy of his and he's been around since then and he was the one who came up with the whole concept of these new weapons with The guided weapons that came up during the first Iraq War, during the Gulf War, those missiles that were able to turn corners and go into bunkers and explode.
Uh, he came up with a whole concept of net wars.
He came up with a whole concept of soldiers that actually would have, they would be androids in a way, because they put on this exoskeletal structure that would allow them to do what Superman does, practically, you know, to lift tanks with one hand, to sense things from, you know, miles away, to go on for days and, you know, not have to eat, sleep, or have any bodily functions, and who's still working on new
weapons, who's thinking of new ways to basically to defeat the enemy.
It doesn't matter who the enemy is, we have to defeat them, and we have to use more money
and more resources that should be utilized for other things.
And that's Andrew Marshall.
Well, RAND has been involved in the militarization of police and of most government functions,
If by militarization you mean a structure whereby you have a command structure, where you have a central authority, and whereby you have experts who come in and determine what is to be done and what is the best way to handle things.
Given a particular ideological perspective, yes, they've been involved.
You've had it even with law enforcement.
They came up with the whole concept of career criminals, with the whole concept of rational choice as the reason why criminals do things, why people get into crime, because they think that is the rational thing to do, which of course sociologists by now have discounted, but it doesn't matter.
They've reshaped the whole Discourse on how career criminals, or how criminals, behave.
Yes, RAND was involved in that study and they have been involved in reshaping the police throughout the country into the military because, again, of rational choice theory, which posits that self-interest is the driving force in all of human behavior.
What I'm surprised is that given all the bad economic news we've had over the past two years, that
we really have not seen those riots. I was expecting them as well. I guess it just points
to the patience of the American people and how in a way, you know, you really have to push
us before we really start acting up like that. I don't think that they see the American
people as the enemy per se.
I think that the American people are seen by technocrats out of Rand and think tanks like it as the peons.
The peons who are told to be told what to do and how to do it because after all, they know better.
They know what's better for you.
Don't bother coming around with ideas of, this is how we want to do things, this is how we've always done it, or local governments should decide this.
No, no, no.
We have come up with a plan, and this is the plan that you should follow.
I mean, it's classical Rand, and it's been there since its creation because they are the technocrats, and technocrats will rule the world because they have reason on their side.
They did not quite develop game theory, although its first and foremost advocate, Von Neumann, worked at RAND for a number of years, and obviously John Nash, who is the most popular figure in game theory, also worked at RAND for a number of years.
They didn't come up with it, but they certainly harbored it, and they certainly hired so many people who worked there during the heyday of kink theory in the nineteen fifties again it all stems from the concept of reason and self-interest that people since people are following self-interest and people are only looking out for themselves therefore it stands to reason that they would think in numerical
Concepts.
They would think of life in quantitative terms, and that they would only be looking out for themselves.
After all, game theory develops as a way of, again, trying to divine what others will do under unknown circumstances.
And, again, thinking that people are always self-interested actors.
There's no such thing as altruism in game theory.
And therefore, it becomes rational, so to speak, that if you have to give up your best friend because you're going to get an advantage, that you will do so.
And if you have to turn your back on the doctrines that your country has always held dear, that you will do so as well, because you stand to gain.
Obviously people are not like that.
And that's one of the things that Rand found out in the late 50s and the late 60s.
When dealing with people who refused to act as rational actors, namely the Viet Cong,
that was like the first major experience that Rand had of people who are not rational.
Because rational theory held well, you know, and it was what the U.S. government did.
government was doing in Vietnam at the time.
We were saying, well, if we bomb them long and hard enough, they'll come to the bargaining table because they'll see we're going to wipe them out.
They realized, after a while, it doesn't work, because these people believe in a cause greater than themselves.
And therefore, with those people appealing through rational self-interest, Doesn't work.
You have to appeal to something else.
Ultimately, Rand gave up on game theory as a prognosticator of human behavior, because they realized that humans are much more than that.
However, that didn't stop them from using that theory then to turn us all into consumers, knowing that they can appeal to that particular aspect of human nature, because after all, we do have that within ourselves. We do have self-interest, obviously, you know,
we have to look out for ourselves, but humans are much more than that. We believe in God, we
believe in our country, we believe in helping others even if we don't get anything out of it
ourselves. And those are things that don't fit into that neat theory called rational choice, and it
certainly doesn't fit into game theory.
As you probably know, I was born in Cuba, and I was there in the early years
of the communist revolution in that country, and I saw what they were trying to do.
They were trying to turn people into, different people, into what they call the new man.
And thus I know what an authoritarian and autocratic technocracy wants to do.
And that's what they were trying to do back in Cuba.
So, when I first heard of Rand, I mean, I thought, oh, it's ridiculous.
I mean, that can't exist.
That can't happen in this country.
And then I thought, well, you know, that's the figment of some pothead who's thinking, oh, you know, it's all these guys who are all going around and they're creating all these monsters that don't exist.
So, when I approached Rand, I came in, you know, as somebody who had actually done some research on actual plots that had been authorized by real madmen, which is what Hitler was, because my previous book dealt with terrorists who had been authorized by Adolf Hitler to come to this country and start a wave of terror right after Pearl Harbor.
And I came up to them and asked them, you know, I'd like to do a book on you.
I don't think anybody has really done anything on you.
And I'd like to see what you're doing and what your contribution to American politics
and to world history has been.
Much to my surprise, they said, we'll do it.
And we'll open up our archives to you.
Our only proviso is that we ask that you tell us what it is that you're going to be dealing
with and that, you know, that you tell us what is it that you want to do.
And I told him, I said, I want to look at everything.
I want to see everything that you've done.
I want to see the good and the bad.
And they opened up their archives.
And, you know, I have nothing bad to say about them when it comes to that.
I have nothing bad to say about them personally either.
I think they're all, and this is the tragic part of it, they're all honorable men.
But you know, isn't that what they, what I think it was Mark Antony said?
Julius Caesar?
They're all honorable men?
Me that as a man, they opened up their archives and I went into it and at the beginning I thought, this can't be true.
I mean, because I started seeing what they were doing.
And I guess they were doing it with the best of intentions.
After all, they do believe that reason is a good thing.
That unbridled reason is an even better thing.
Which of course I totally disagree with.
And once I saw what they were doing, I just had to come to my own conclusions.
I do believe that Ryan expected me to give him a pat on the back
and say, that's the way to go, fellas.
You know, I mean, good for you.
Let's show him what people who believe in reason can do.
But you know, I mean, I come...
I was born in a country that tried to do that and went nowhere.
And right now it's one of the poorest countries in the world.
Everybody's poor right now over there.
It's a mess.
And I've seen what happens when you have a small group of people that pretend to speak on behalf of the majority.
I just cannot accept that.
I'm a real believer in democracy and I'm really grateful to this country for having given me a chance to grow up here and to see what democracy is all about and to realize that, you know, it's really what those people back in the 60s were saying, only now I really believe in it, which is really power to the people.
I mean, it's really the people of this country that really have to rise up and say, this is what we want to do and we have to stop small groups of technocrats and and self-appointed messiahs to come and tell us,
this is what's good for you, and this is what you have to do.
It's up to us to decide what our future is. It's up to the American people
to decide what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.
And I hope nobody ever forgets that. Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming another Cuba.
Stay informed. You have to know things.
You can't rely on somebody else coming and telling you, this is what's good for you.
No!
We have to go out and we have to do the research ourselves.
You have to find out what is going on in this world and who are the people who are really looking out for you and who are the people who are really not acting in your best interest.
An informed people is the best defense against tyranny.
And I'm afraid that unless we continually keep that in front of us, unless we stay informed, unless we stay vigilant, as Thomas Jefferson warned us, that we will be facing great danger in the years ahead.
Now, one of the oddest things about rational choice is how it affects your medical care.
Now, remember, rational choice means that you're looking out for self-interest, right?
You're looking out for yourself, right?
Now, what people don't realize is that medical plans, up until the 1970s approximately, pay for everything.
There were no deductibles.
What you and I pay as deductibles, right now, came out of something called the Rand Medical Experiment.
President Nixon wanted to cut back on the amount of money that the federal government was spending on Medicare.
So therefore, it authorized RAND to conduct an experiment, and it did so with tens of thousands of people, whereby they were offered certain kinds of medical treatment and medical benefits, and others were not, depending on how much people were going to use them.
It turned out that most people did not really want to use all the benefits to which they were entitled, and that apparently people did not object when they had to pay a small sum for the deductible.
And seeing that people did not object, and that they were going to be getting more or less the same kind of treatment, and the same kind of benefits, the federal government decided, well, from now on, I guess we'll just impose a deductible on Medicare, on all the medical benefits that we offer.
When the federal government started doing that, first in certain select localities and then throughout the country, private practice, private industry looked at it and said, hey, if they're doing it, we can do it now.
So then deductibles began very small at first.
I don't know if people will remember that, but it used to be just a few dollars.
But now it then started increasing and increasing and increasing until at the end it became almost like the employee was mostly responsible for the lion's share of whatever the medical costs were going to be.
So that's one of the things that we can thank Rand for.
You're deductible.
You're medical deductible.
Straight out of a Rand experiment.
If nobody opposes them, they'll go ahead and say, well, let's impose it.
That's why I always say, it's an informed public.
It's the American people that can stop this.
The American people are an ethical people.
They're patriotic people.
They know what's right, and they know what's wrong.
And they know what works, and they know what doesn't.
And unless we speak up, these things will happen.
And people will come up with these cockamamie plans, with these weird things whereby they expect us to pull the money out of our pockets and pay for something that we don't have to, because we don't speak up, because we don't say, no, that's not the way it's gonna be.
We think different.
Unless we speak up, this will continue to happen.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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