The U.S. Economy Depends on War… But Who’s Really in Control? (Uncut) 02-08-2025

The U.S. Economy Depends on War… But Who’s Really in Control?

I really appreciate you making the time to come to this show. You’ve never been to my conference before. It means a lot that you’re here.

There’s a lot of ground that I want to cover in the next 20 minutes. We have a jammed house. Here’s where I want to start.

The last time you and I spoke, you told me Washington has become donor-occupied territory, which is to say, and I was thinking about this after we chatted, that’s to say that the lobby groups have kidnapped democracy to an extent. That’s how I internalized that. How is that internalization, and if you wouldn’t mind expanding on that statement and why you made it to me? Sure.

I’m happy to expand on it. I just wanted to tell everybody that I have not been in Canada since 1967. Things have kind of changed.

But when I was here in the 67, my grandfather had taken me to Montreal to the Expo, and the whole purpose of the trip was so that I could sit at the stadium and watch as 500 bagpipers marched in with the mass pipes and drums, at which point in time, tears streamed down our faces, and he said, now you’ve seen the last of the great British-Canadian army. He was someone that never quite got over the decline and followed the British Empire. Anyway, that said, yes, Washington is donor-occupied territory.

Ralph Nader used to say it’s corporate-occupied territory. I would say now it’s really billionaire donor-occupied territory. Now, how does this happen? Have we ever had these problems before? Well, of course.

We had problems after the Civil War with the railroad magnets, people like Vanderbilt, and then came Standard Oil with Rockefeller. But we also had leadership that was a little different then, and they understood what was going on, and they broke it up. Some of you may or may not recall we had a man named Theodore Roosevelt, who was somewhat on the lunatic fringe in some areas, but one thing that he absolutely got right was breaking up monopolies, and so he broke up Standard Oil.

We had a process of trying to systematically counter the donor occupation, if you will. That’s completely gone. The second thing is that we have a system of what I would call legalized corruption.

You don’t call it corruption, because technically it’s legal. Of course it’s corruption, but it’s legal corruption. If you want to spend 10 minutes with Senator so-and-so, I’ve been through this by the way, you have to put $15,000 into his campaign re-election fund.

To his credit, Senator McCain, and I was not a Senator McCain fan or supporter, but I was brought in to talk to him about the armed forces. This is back in 2015, I guess, 2015, in that time frame, and he said, no, no, no, no, that’s out of the question. No such expectation, because he believed in the armed forces.

He was worried about that, and I want to hear what he has to say. But for the most part, that’s what you’re dealing with right now, and it’s gotten to the point where I think Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out recently that he had tried to pass some legislation condemning what has been done in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force as a war crime. And after it was over, I think he got 15 votes, several Senators, Democrats and Republicans came up to him and he said, oh, you know I agree with you, but I could never possibly do that.

If I did that, the millions of dollars would be poured in to destroy me. I’d never be re-elected, I’d be finished. So that tells you to some extent how powerful certain lobbies are, and the Israel lobby is by no stretch of the imagination the only one.

It’s just a very formidable one. And if you can acquire and accumulate a lot of money, and you are only concerned about one thing, in the case of Israel, it’s Israel, the Israel lobby, you can be very effective. You can meet with somebody who said, we want to give you a million dollars for your re-election campaign.

But if you’re not going to vote with us, then we’re going to meet with your opponent, we don’t know who he is, and we’re going to make him the same offer. So either you take it or he takes it, it’s up to you. It’s that, it’s that obvious.

And that’s not a good thing. So I don’t think it’s just a question of kidnapping democracy. I think it’s a sham.

It’s just, it’s just not real. So to your point, we’ve seen corporate interests become that powerful before. You mentioned Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, you know, JPMorgan effectively bankrolled Wall Street in 1913.

We’ve seen it happen, but something’s different this time. This morning on the panel, we talked about the idea of a technocracy taking over the U.S., infiltrating the current administration. What’s what’s different? If we’ve seen these power players in the past, we’re seeing them again today.

Is there less political will? Is there more political corruption? Are the corporate interests just that much more powerful today? Or what is the difference between then and now? Well, imagine that you for a second are an American citizen. You live on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri, or perhaps in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, any number of different places. How much attention do you pay to what happens beyond the borders of your country? Almost none.

That’s a big problem. Americans just, a Spanish general staff officer worked for me when I was at Supreme Headquarters of Light Powers Europe. He said, Douglas, America is not a country, it’s a planet.

And I think that’s a very accurate statement. We live on our own planet. We are the center of our own universe.

And quite frankly, what goes on beyond those borders doesn’t matter, provided it doesn’t affect someone at home. So the difference between what has been going on for the last 30 years, let us say, and what happened in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, was that we still had large numbers of American citizens in the armed forces. At least 1 or 2% of the population, 3% had direct connectivity to it.

People that had parents or grandparents that had fought in various wars. So there was an interest in the military. There was also an interest in trade agreements and so forth.

These things tended to wane in the 1990s. We lived in this environment of plenty, you know, where everyone could pretty much have everything they wanted. And I remember when the government shut down, Newt Gingrich confronted Bill Clinton very stupidly, and Clinton hanged him for it, as he richly deserved, but we shut the government down, trying to push Clinton into doing something he didn’t want to do.

And they were interviewing people on the television, well, Mr. So-and-so, what do you think? And Mr. So-and-so, they came upon this man riding his bicycle with a six-pack of beer on the back and said, well, what do you think? He said, well, you know, really, I don’t care. As long as I can buy a six-pack, go home and watch the game on TV, what difference does it make to me? That has really also helped to bring us to this point. And if you don’t turn in high casualties in one of your interventions, you don’t awaken the sleeping beast.

Seven or eight here, seven or eight there, nine or ten here. People say, oh, well, that’s unfortunate, but everybody sort of goes back to sleep. If you go back to 1982, where we had this bombing in a barracks in Beirut, and over 300 Marines were killed, you’ll remember that Ronald Reagan went out there and personally welcomed back the remains of everyone who was killed.

That was a big moment, the whole country paid attention. The lesson that was taken on the Hill was, don’t take big casualties in one day. You can take those 300 or 400 over a couple of months, but not in one day.

And that’s been the rule of thumb. And that’s why you have this very heavy reliance on massive firepower wherever we go to fight someone. And fortunately for us, since 1991, we haven’t really encountered anybody who had the air defenses and the firepower to respond.

So if you’re fighting people that largely can’t fight back, you can look pretty good. And that’s what we’ve done. So this problem is compounded on the donor side by the disinterest of the American public, the voting electorate.

And then, of course, you can stand up at one election after the other and say, we’re the greatest nation in the world, our armed forces can defeat anyone. You remember hearing that over and over and over again when I was in the Trump administration at the end. And I kept saying, you know, that’s not true.

And oh, no, no, no, we’re the best, we’re the best. Well, it’s just not true. It was sort of like the British and the French before 1914.

They had done very well in their colonies. Then they had to fight the Imperial German Army. Things didn’t go very well.

So the point is, we are very similar in that regard. We have been operating within the framework of this sort of quasi-imperial environment. So you put that together with the donor occupation.

Now, the donors can pretty much say, well, we want you to go to country X. We want a color revolution. We want the National Endowment for Democracy to work with the CIA. National Endowment for Democracy is effectively a CIA front anyway.

And we want you to stage a color revolution and overthrow the government. Some of you may not remember, we tried to do that after Russia intervened in eastern Ukraine and Kazakhstan. It didn’t work, but that was an attempt.

We tried it in Georgia. Most recently, again, it did work in Ukraine in 2014. And everybody says, well, okay, well, what happened? Well, a new government there, and they’re pro-Western.

Oh, okay, good, back to sleep. Nobody pays attention. And then you say, well, we’re sending billions of dollars here and billions of dollars there.

Well, the stock market’s up, and we’re trying to keep pace with inflation. And I still have two cars, and I live in a house, and I can afford the mortgage. I guess that’s okay.

There’s no sense of proportionality. There’s no understanding, no comprehension of the importance of these decisions and the damaging consequences. So it’s all wrapped together.

And right now, these billionaires, you could probably say there are 10 or 15, are really interested in shaping the outcomes. And you see them with candidates in some cases, as you’re seeing them with President Trump. And in other cases, you don’t see them.

But they’re there, and they’re making their presence felt. During the Biden administration, I was told that George Soros was the shadow national security advisor. In other words, he was really advising, not Jake Sullivan.

Jake Sullivan was there, but Soros could pick up the phone and call the President and say, this is what I want. And it was done. This is not a good situation.

Now, the real question is, are Americans paying attention? And I’m always asked over and over and over again, do you think Americans are paying attention? And I always answer, when did the French Revolution finally break out? When the people of Paris could not afford to buy bread. So that’s my answer. When things go south, when they get really bad, inflation is out of control.

And of course, I’m sure you’re watching Jay Powell. He’s a very good man, by the way, highly intelligent. He’s trying to do good things.

But you notice that he’s cut interest rates, and at the same time, he’s cutting interest rates. The interest rates on the 10-year Treasury bond continue to inch up. He’s not in control.

We are not in control anymore. So the proverbial debt bomb and its uncertain implications is inevitably going off. That may wake everybody up.

So normally, as an outsider, as a non-American, I would say that whoever takes the presidency doesn’t matter that much. I have always felt that’s the beauty of the US Constitution, is that it limits the power of any one person. But there might be certain moments in history where that’s different.

And a lot of people are believing this is one of those moments. Tomorrow, Trump will take the oath for the second time. He campaigned on the promise to drain the swamp.

You could say his first term was unsuccessful, delivering on that. He’s now four years experience attempting. He’s had a four year break to rethink the strategy.

And he’s back now with a whole new community of leaders to deliver on that. But as you mentioned, I mean, this may just be new corporate interests with new agendas. So what’s your take on the Trump moment and how disruptive will it be, if at all? Well, I’ve got a good friend, and some of you may have seen him speak.

He’s a brilliant man, well worth listening to, named Ambassador Chas Freeman. And Ambassador Freeman was the ambassador in China, as well as Saudi Arabia. Man’s a miracle, he speaks perfect Chinese and perfect Arabic.

How I, I can’t explain that, but he does. And he knows what he’s talking about. And he said to me one time, he said, Douglas, every four years there’s a tendency to lobotomize the US government.

And there’s a lot of truth in that statement. We have a new president, he has all the answers, he has a new team. They have all the answers, now they’re going to implement.

So I think there’s some of that going on right now with the Trump crowd. However, we don’t really know with certainty exactly how things will turn out. Because a lot of the people do not really reflect historically what Trump has thought and said.

Donald Trump, and I’ve met him and I know him, if there’s nothing else there, he is fundamentally anti-war. It’s the truth, he’s anti-war. But he gets caught up in the same thing that many, many presidents do.

I have to be tough, I have to be tough, they need to understand I’m serious. And that gets in the way sometimes, because his advisors will march in and say those things. I don’t know how it’s going to go, but I can say one thing, that every single member of his cabinet has effectively said, Israel is our first priority.

And to be anti-war is to be anti the most lucrative industry in America, is it not? I thought gold was still the most lucrative industry out there, or oil or something else. This business about the military industrial, we call it congressional complex, that was the original name that Eisenhower used. It is a menace, because these defense firms were consolidated from many into five.

And they transformed themselves into state-owned enterprises, if you are familiar with that phrase. And as a result, you have to feed the state-owned enterprise. That’s part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is that you have senior military people who don’t know what they’re doing most of the time. There is no strategy. There just isn’t any strategy.

We haven’t had any strategy, I would argue, since the early 90s. And even after World War II, we gradually embraced this Cold War strategy of containment. Which wasn’t supposed to be militarized, by the way.

It was just that if you maintain your own health as an economy and your own prosperity, eventually the others will fall apart. That’s what effectively happened. That was what George Kennan recommended, but we militarized it.

And it became a self-perpetuating industry. You’ve got to keep this going because this is part of containment. Well, when that ended, there was then a mad search on the Hill, that is in the Senate and the House, for new places to go, new people to fight, new enemies to create in order to justify this enormous military establishment.

And that’s what happened. And that’s how you end up as an American, as I did, in Bosnia, walking the streets of Sarajevo, never in my life. As a West Point cadet, did I ever think I would end up in Sarajevo? But there I was, and then suddenly you end up in other places that you never thought you would go.

Vietnam was certainly one of those, but there are many others that I can point to. Taiwan, 6,000 miles from the United States. We had written it off as part of China, end of discussion.

All of a sudden now, it’s become vital to our national strategic interests. It depends upon how you define vital. So there is no strategy.

It’s a strategy of opportunism, of finding something and invading and going there. Now, I think that’s going to come to a screeching halt, but not because anybody has sobered up and recognized the futility and stupidity of this. It’s going to end because we can’t afford it anymore.

That’s coming. Not there yet, but we’re very close. Okay, so I have to ask you this question, actually, because Dr. Pippa Malmgren and I were discussing this on stage one hour ago.

And this was the recent phenomenon of all of these unidentified aerial objects, all of these drones making appearances all over the US, starting in New Jersey, but appearing everywhere, often close to sensitive infrastructure, energy facilities, military facilities. And what was most striking about it, obviously, was the lack of answers about what these things are and where they came from. What’s your perspective on that? Well, I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, so I have some Italian friends, and some of them live in New Jersey.

So I called them immediately, I said, what the hell are you doing? And they said, what do you mean? I said, you’re Italian, I know what you’re up to, you’re friends in organized crime, this is some sham. No, no, that’s not us. Okay, so it wasn’t them.

I do not know is the right answer at this point. President Trump said that, effectively. He said, I don’t know, I just don’t know.

Now, you wanna speculate, you can speculate till the cows come home. It won’t necessarily lead you to an answer. But I think that most of this is probably something that we’ve created, whether or not that’s based on borrowed alien technology or stolen alien technology.

Who knows, maybe Tom Cruise in his last movie went to Mars and came back with something. Who knows, and I think we have to leave it there. President Trump said that he’s going to find out and he’s going to tell the American people.

We are owed an answer, there’s no question about it. By the way, it’s global. These things are showing up all over the place.

So this is not unique to us. That’s even more concerning. That’s, it’s actually mind blowing to me.

That strikes me as such a supernatural occurrence that, and that you could sit here and be, are you comfortable in the unknowing? Or do you have concerns? Like, where do you land on that when you see activity like this so spread out all over the country and it’s inexplicable? And we have no answers. How does that sit with you? Well, I spent my life in the cavalry, in the army, and the unknown and uncertainty were, that was the space we operated in. Chaos was our friend.

So, I’m not too worried about it because I can’t influence it. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. I can’t explain it.

I think eventually we will find out. Now, consider the possibility that there is alien involvement in some fashion. If you look at these things and the way they move, obviously they’ve broken the laws of fractal mathematics.

And let me tell you, that’s pretty tough. You know, I almost failed it at West Point. So, fractal mathematics and the laws of physics.

You’re gonna relate light, gravity, and magnetism. You can do those three things. That’s something no one has been able to do.

You’re, you get everything you’re seeing. Now, if that’s happened, that’s gonna change the world as we know it. Everything is going to change.

And I suspect that a lot of people who may know the answers to these questions are aware of the profound impact of that change, and that’s why it is being slow rolled. I mean, clearly it’s not an accident that we’ve had within the last couple of decades, or three decades, all these brilliant sci-fi films. It’s not hard to imagine that somebody is trying to condition us or socialize us to this.

And I’m sure many of you did hear President Medvedev. Years ago in Russia, he was interviewed on a program, and after it was over, he didn’t know the mic was on. This young woman came up, a journalist, and said, what do you have in your book? And he said, these are the names of all the aliens that are living inside Russia.

She said, well, what do you mean aliens? He said, people from other worlds. And she said, really? He said, you’d be surprised how many live here. I know, many of you think that’s Washington DC anyway.

But nevertheless, you can watch that, that’s real, and he said it in a very straightforward, unrehearsed fashion. So I don’t know, but I think we’re in for something soon. Wow, look, Colonel McGregor, thank you so much for joining me on stage today.

Colonel McGregor will be joining me back on stage tomorrow afternoon. I think at 4.30 PM back in the main hall. Ladies and gentlemen, please give him a round of applause today.

Thank you.