Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/10/23 Eli Clifton: The Weapons Companies are the Big Winners of the War in Ukraine

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Scott interviews Eli Clifton of the Quincy Institute about some articles he wrote for Responsible Statecraft—the Quincy Institute’s publication. They begin with an article Clifton wrote about the fantastic year weapons companies had in 2022. Clifton has listened in on their calls to shareholders and reports that the way these companies present themselves to investors differs from how they present themselves to the public. They then talk about the absurd ways people are dismissing the reasonable concern about nuclear weapons as the U.S. embarks on a new era of Great Power Competition.  Discussed on the show: “Ukraine War is great for the portfolio, as defense stocks enjoy a banner year” (Responsible Statecraft) “Game On” (Harper’s Magazine) “Pro-bono Ukraine lobbyists quietly profit from defense contractor clients” (Responsible Statecraft) Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative-Journalist-at-Large at Responsible Statecraft. Follow him on Twitter @EliClifton. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey guys on the line i got eli clifton he's one of the main guys over there at the quincy institute that's a responsible statecraft dot org welcome back to the show eli how you doing i'm doing well thanks for having me happy to have you here man, you've got this great article all about what a corrupt evil empire America is. Ukraine war is great for the portfolio as defense stocks enjoy a banner year.

So you might even put a correlation and a causation on how poorly other stocks are doing as all our money is confiscated and poured into destruction. But anyway, do tell about the big five, as you call them here. Well, I think you pretty much nailed it. It's, you know, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, which make up pretty much a huge portion of the defense and weapons sector in the United States, and actually globally. And these companies, exactly when you compare it to the performance of other stocks, did shockingly well in the past year. And I use the one-year mark being the day before Russia's invasion of Ukraine until the one-year anniversary. And what I found, in comparing them, is that on average, these five weapon stocks outperformed the S&P 500 by nearly 18%. They outperformed the NASDAQ by 23.8%. And they outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial average by 12.7%. And as you just said, you know, hey, most investments actually declined in this period, you know, fears about energy prices, the fact that there was a land war in Europe.

There was a lot going on that made investors and just the fundamentals of a lot of economies of a lot of economies, not just in the United States, but around the world, kind of suffer, you know, concerns about food shortages, stuff like that. Two out of three of those indexes, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, they reported losses in that one-year period. And I think it's important to remember that a lot of retail investors, a lot of people who invest their 401K, a lot of people who are just starting to dabble in the stock market and kind of want an easy way to invest, they invest in index funds.

And for the most part, these index funds are pretty good investments. You know, you're basically buying a basket of all the stocks in the index. And so a lot of people have their retirement, largely invested in these sorts of index funds. And they would have lost money in the past year. While at the meantime, these weapons companies who derive an overwhelming amount of their revenue from the U.S. government, they've reported massive, massive profits. Yeah. Man, it's just incredible the way, you know, there's got to be some recognition there. And like, yeah, it's blood money, but hey, I got a mortgage or some kind of thing, right?

Or is it just I'll grind their bones to make my bread? And these people just don't care at all what's happening? I mean, for the most part, you know, what I started to listen to listen to the quarterly earnings calls from these companies. And I think it's really interesting. And I recommend that everybody do so because, you know, generally these companies, you know, they have their outward facing persona, which is that, hey, you know, they're just responsive to the Department of Defense and to the national security needs. of the United States and that, you know, that they, they, they, they're just here to serve, which is, you know, maybe not entirely honest, but, but it is pretty good spin, and I think it's worked well for them. But, you know, they can't talk like that to their investors because

their investors, you know, that's not their investor's top concern. Their investor's top concern is what sort of a return am I going to get on my money. So, so that's where you start to see some interesting things, like in January 2020, this was before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but there were starting to be murmurs of potential tensions there. You know, Erathion's CEO, Greg Hayes, he told his investors that global instability presented a profit opportunity for his weapons firm. He said, quote, we are seeing, I would say, opportunities for international sales. And he cited among other global events going on, tensions in Eastern Europe. And he went on to add all of those things are putting pressure

on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we're going to see some benefit from it. Now, flash forward, you know, these companies have actually with their huge, huge, huge profits, again, if these are companies that are truly looking out for the best interest of U.S. national security and of the U.S. economy, you would think, well, okay, fine, you know, they could make a good profit. And given that, you know, in the case of, like, Lockheed Martin, something like 70% of their revenue comes from, actually 71% comes from U.S. government contracts, you would think that, hey, you know, maybe they would do the right thing and, like, reinvested in their own industrial base and into their companies and into their employees and, you know,

all of those types of things. But that's not, that's not really what they did. You know, in the case of Lockheed, you know, they boasted about their stock buybacks, that they spent like $11 billion in 2022 on share repurchases and dividend payments, creating, quote, significant value for our shareholders. Now, that's effectively a partially taxpayer-funded payout to their investors. It's not a reinvestment of that money. It's just going back to their shareholders. So that's, I mean, you can argue they're sort of just skimming here, taking money that comes from taxpayers. An overwhelming large part of their business comes from the defense budget. And instead of investing it, as now we have all these concerns about the U.S. defense industrial base, can we produce enough ammunition, all sorts

of questions about our own production capabilities. Well, these companies, their first instinct is to create significant value for our shareholders, as Lockheed CEO, Jim Teichlet said. And that meant handing the money basically just back to them instead of reinvesting it. uh what's funny about that is how blatant of a direct welfare payment to rich people this is right in front of everyone and putting it all in dividends and all these things you might think if you had just fallen off the turnip truck or something that you know large corporations would you know dedicate a part of their operations to creating defense materials that the government needs for no profit at all because that's their patriotic duty because don't you know

war to win and we got to defend ourselves from the people attacking us or something like that, why should they profit at all? I mean, cost is one thing, but cost plus even one cent sure sounds corrupt to me. And if, after all, there's no real need for it, then I guess they won't do it. But if there really is a need for it, then why do they have to make so much money that they can afford to do stock buybacks and dividend checks. This whole thing is just insane. If we're talking about another country, we would be like, man, can you believe how they do it over in that other country? Right? It's insane that they do it this way. We do it this way. Generations on in now. And needless to say, this doesn't incentivize, you know, efficiencies that you look at

like the defense budget. It's ballooning. We're careening toward a trillion dollars a year. And year in the defense budget when you really put it all together and roughly half of that when you think the defense budget you know you want to thank nice things yeah i think most people want to assume that that goes to like you know salaries for for our armed forces maybe uh um you know the the cost of maintaining bases you know things that you know you can quibble about the size of our our standing army and all of that but you know that's where you kind of are hoping that money would go to but the truth is that half of it goes to defense contractors and that's not just like open-bid competitive defense contractors who are going to get you the best value at the lowest

price. No, this is increasingly a monopolized market by these five companies. And, you know, again, you look at Lockheed Martin, 71 percent of their $67 billion in net sales in 2021 were from the U.S. government. Now, sure, they're a private company in the sense that they get to hand a significant portion of their profits over to their shareholders via dividend payments and share repurchases. But when you look at their source of revenue, that starts to look an awful lot like this is some sort of a public-private partnership or just a, you know, a nationalized firm. Yeah, fascist combine. And one can argue maybe they should be, in which case they would certainly not be handing that sort of money over to their shareholders. And again, let's look at

where your average taxpayer is investing their money. Because your average taxpayer, if they're invested in the stock market, has it in index funds. They're not overwhelmingly weighted towards these weapons firms. So they lost money. They're tax dollars that they still had to pay, went to these firms, and then these firms turned around and just handed the money back to their own investors. It starts to look like something pretty unpleasant for average retail investors. Yeah, absolutely. And then 70% held. The other 30% is the American state's allies in Israel and in Europe, because remember Lockheed created the project for NATO expansion, the committee for NATO expansion, and the committee for the liberation of

Iraq and all these things. And so it's their policy that they dictated that says that we got to keep all of these countries armed up with Lockheed products. So that's 100% of the game there is the U.S. Empire is their market, period. And I got to tell

you when you listen to these earnings calls, as again, I cannot recommend it highly enough. You know, one, what, what there's a number, you know, depending on the circumstances, current events every quarter, you know, they'll kind of talk about different things in terms of the outlook for them and their businesses. But one thing that I see them, there's actually two things that I see them regularly that investors

want to hear about and that the executives want to talk about. One is going to be, of course, the defense budget, whether or not it will continue to grow because that's the bottom line for a lot of these companies and their investors. And the other thing is great power competition. And these companies and these executives are really loving to talk about great power competition because, frankly, that's where the money is for them. And persuading not just the United States, but other allied countries, especially in Europe, to invest in these prestige weapon systems like the F-35 or the literal combat ship,

which it turns out the Navy doesn't actually want here because it's not good. Those are the types of things that they really try to justify a lot of their forward-looking product development towards. And it's all about, you know, it's not so remunerative when you say, oh, well, you know, the future of armed conflict could be, you know, non-state actors or any of that stuff. because that gets more authority, that gets more complicated. That doesn't have, you know, the big clashes that you could get with, you know, that would use an F-35, they would use a literal combat ship. And those are the types of things that these executives clearly, clearly, clearly want to talk about. They want policymakers to think about.

And they want their investors, frankly, to look forward to. Yeah. All right. Hey, I want to play this clip. It's just short 25 seconds. And I'm sorry, they don't say the guy's name, but it's Yahoo Finance interviewing this. investor, and this is from a couple of months ago. Let's see, it was from, oh, it's just from January. As far as industrials, my favorite sector remains defense and aerospace. This is the

group that carried me to victory in 2022. I am not changing my trajectory with the geopolitical world the way it is. I'm still on Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, which is kind of a new one for me, and CACI International. As long as I have those names, and as long as people want to kill each other on this planet, I think I might be all right. So there you go. Hey, as long as people are killing each other, I'm making money. My portfolio's doing fine. You should be like me and it'll be fine. I mean, hey, he's probably right. If you're strictly agnostic about how you invest your money and you know, you want the most consistent return and the biggest growth in a period in time in which, you know, we are. I think unfortunately, careening towards various forms of great power competition, not just with Russia, but with China as well. These are companies that are going to do really, really, really, really, really. well because they profit from hyping these fears. They profit from global instability. They profit from national security threats, be they domestic or foreign to the United States. I mean, these companies

that do well when the rest of us are doing badly. That's their bottom line. And I don't even think that they really conceal it that much when they talk to their own investors. Right. So how would one go about finding out what number to call and when and where Lockheed and Raytheon and general dynamics going to brag about all of their blood money like this, as you're saying here. You know, it's open to anyone. Anyone can listen in on their earnings calls. They stream it live and even better, both Yahoo Finance that you just mentioned, which is a great resource as well as fool.com.

Usually within, in my preferred preference, preferred way to learn about these calls is to do it this way. You go to those sites like the day after the calls are scheduled, and they actually put up for free the transcripts of the calls. So you can, you know, read through it at your own, at your own. own leisure, and look at these executives talking about, you know, how the world being a pretty dangerous and awful place is looking pretty good for their order books. Yeah, man. You know, as Andrew Coburn reported back when the Little Green Men seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, he had a friend who was at some brunch or lunch or something in Crystal City with all these

war contractors and they were all thrilled and you know fist bumps and high fives and laughter all around and i forget the exact quote or something about how static they were because yeah yeah all that stuff about where we're friends with the russians man it's over now get right back to long-range bombers and ships and subs and big ticket items man forget the b1 and the b2 and we're going for the b21 now we're going to do whatever the hell we feel like. But you know what? I think that that's, and I'm speculating here, but, you know, one thing I've seen in these

calls is a degree of enthusiasm for the so-called great power competition and certainly the Russia-Ukraine war from these companies that I don't recall seeing to quite the same degree during the so-called global war on terror. And, you know, it's not that these companies didn't do really well during the 20-year G-JWAT, but, you know, one thing about those wars is that a lot of it was sort of against non-state actors, and there were certainly a lot of war profiteering that went on, but the truth is that kind of small contractors could get in on the grift. And they did in a big way in countries like Afghanistan. It wasn't just the big guys. It was everyone. And that's not to say that isn't going on

in Ukraine, but when you talk about, are we going to be able to compete with countries like Russia, countries like China, you know, that's where I think the top five weapons firms, you know, that's really to them like catnip because for them this is where they're prestige weapons this is where submarines this is where you know literal combat ships this is where uh f-35s start to be you know kind of that's the purpose of these weapons it's not to be dealing with uh you know somebody fighting from a cave uh not to say they don't use them for that but it's a little harder to market it for that and you know i you could hear them on these calls practically salivating at the idea that now we get to talk about competing against you know china

who have their own stealth fighter against Russia and Russia and China both have hypersonic missiles and those are the areas that are like really high end really niche and frankly like only companies as big as Lockheed as Raytheon as Boeing as Northrop as General Dynamics can really compete in that space in a meaningful way so it's like this is right in their sector yeah absolutely

hey guys Scott here for Leo Hamel find jewelers out of San Diego at Jewelry StoreSD.com They do business nationwide. They sell jewelry and watches, specializing in engagement rings. You know, in case you're in love with somebody. They also specialize in one-of-a-kind vintage and antique jewelry, fully serviced pre-owned fine watches, such as Rolex, Patech, Philippe, Cartier, and any high-end brand.

Leos also services high-end watches faster and cheaper than going to a factory service center. Leos takes all the stress out of shopping for jewelry and engagement rings, and always at the right price. They deal nationwide over the phone at 61929-299-1500. That's Leo Hamill find jewelers out of San Diego. Go to Jewelry StoreSD.com to check out their fine selection and to find out more. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com.

And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart.

Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libretasbella.com. So even more money and even less little guys to mess. around with. Well, so Michelle Flournoy, who I take it help coin the phrase full spectrum dominance when she was lower level flunky at the Pentagon in the 1990s and of course help push for the massive coin surge in Afghanistan and then help oversee its failure as Deputy Secretary of Defense for policy under Obama there. She then could have been Obama's Secretary of Defense, but she wanted to wait for Hillary. Ha ha. And so instead, she had to go and

just make millions of dollars at West Exec Advisors being not a lobbyist but an advisor on how to get your weapons contracts over there. And she had said recently, talking about China, the idea, someone had brought up the fact that the Chinese have enough of these relatively inexpensive supersonic sea skimming missiles that we have, you know, some defense against with the Aegis radar and machine guns and what have you, but not really and not against. it's like full salvos and so forth, and that it threatens to make our entire surface fleet obsolete or worse, you know, fish tanks at the bottom of the Pacific.

And although full of sailors still. And Florinoi responded that, well, we just need fleets of B-1s then. And we'll just take them out from the air. And we need to be able to, you know this one, I'm sure. We need to be able to sink the entire Chinese fleet in 72 hours. And we'll do it with B-1s. If they can sink our ships, we'll just hit them from the skies.

And then, but not that she has a contract with the B1 guys or anything. And I hear this, and you know what, I'm, listen, I'm not opposed to the Pentagon having contingency plans for all sorts of stuff. I'm sure they have a contingency plan for, you know, Canada invading the United States, as well they should. You know, it's their job to have these, you know, these binders, right? that sort of explore various possibilities. And perhaps that should even guide to some degree the acquisition of weapons. What I'd like to hear a lot more of, though, especially with countries like China, is we seem to spend a lot of time talking about how we would win a war against them

and a lot less time talking about how could we avoid having to fight a war and how can we certainly avoid accidentally getting into a war with China. And when you're throwing around stuff like this, when you have an Air Force General talking about how it would be good for the marriages, of the airmen under his command if there was a war with China, things have kind of got off the rails a little bit. We need to be talking a little more seriously about how we can avoid what would be a catastrophic event. It's one of those things where maybe you can win it, but you start to wonder what does winning really look like if you have to fight against another nuclear-armed

country. Usually we've tried to avoid those sorts of conflicts. We're getting really close to it in Ukraine right now. And I worry that even some people who who talk about we shouldn't be focusing so much on Russia as a competitor, we should be pivoting to China instead, are purely trying to switch one for the other, instead of asking some deeper questions about what we can do with our diplomacy and what can we do to try to avoid the types of conflicts that really anybody, when you start to really sit down and start talking with them about what these conflicts would look like, will agree that even if you could win these wars, you don't want to have to fight these.

Yeah, I mean, people are just in denial about the power of the H-bomb, or or the willingness of nation states to use them if they feel like they have to, which could be some squishy algorithm that you wouldn't agree with, right? You might advise Chairman She that like, oh, no, you don't need to resort age bombs yet, but he might think that he does. You know, that's what you're dealing with is... And you really don't want to be playing around on the margins of those types of judgment calls. Yeah, seriously.

I saw a debate going on on the Twitters yesterday where Michael McFaul is saying, you don't know that the Russians will use nuclear weapons to retain control over Crimea. And then Daniel De Petrus, who's been pretty lousy lately. But anyway, he was saying, come on, man. What are you talking about? We're talking about raising the risk of nuclear war

and to an unacceptable degree over Crimea. And, you know, Max Abrams is a great. I don't know if he's a non-interventionist, but he's a really great academic on, he's been really great on Syria and on Ukraine and a few other things. And he was saying, look, nobody knows the future 100%. No international relations scholar could tell you or should say that if you do this, this is guaranteed to happen. This is all about risks and tradeoffs. And who the hell does Michael McPhall think he's kidding? And we're going to get in a nuclear war over the Crimean Peninsula.

We wouldn't deploy our army there, but we're willing to trade Houston for it and lose it anyway? Or what are we even talking about? Well, that's exactly it, is that, you know, you talk and people say, well, you know what, like Putin apparently, you know, was engaged in nuclear saber rattling. And maybe he wasn't as, you know, as close to using them as he kind of suggested early on in the war. And, you know, let's for the sake of argument say that's true. There's still this quality that, like, you know, and I understand we're engaged in, you know, you're trying to make speculation and guesses here about. other people's behavior and it's hard to anticipate other people's behavior but let's say you're wrong on one side of that equation and you overestimate in the case let's say for the sake of

argument putin's willingness to use nuclear weapons the consequences of overestimating that you know might not be great but you know they're they're probably survivable the let's say you underestimate his willingness to use them now you're dealing with existential consequences So, yeah, maybe people, I think should be, you should lean toward, if you've got to lean one way or the other in the speculation or in the guessing here, maybe we should be avoiding circumstances where we're kind of saying, well, we're getting awfully close to a coin flip about whether or not this person might use nuclear weapons. We shouldn't be in that space. We should be looking to what we can do to try to disincentivize someone from using them and trying to set a global stage where actors who have enormous nuclear arsenals are less likely to be incentivized. to use them. We shouldn't be offering, we shouldn't be existentially threatening people who

have second strike nuclear capabilities. You know, that's the whole idea of a second strike nuclear capability. That's the whole idea of mutually destroyed destruction. You shouldn't be doing that type of thing. Yeah. You know, there's that great Jack Kennedy quote. I think it's from the American University speech

where he says, should never put another nuclear weapon state in a position where they feel like they have no way to back down and still save face, which I think is such an important way to put it too, that yeah, people will blow up the whole world over embarrassment. Saving face means a lot to a lot of people and not just the Japanese, but everybody, you know, and you got to, you know, you get into a conflict with a guy like

Khrushchev, you demand that he back all the way down in Cuba, you better be willing to give up your nukes in Turkey. Well, at least the Jupiter missiles, if not the plane dropped ones. You know, you've got to be willing to make a compromise somewhere, promise not to invade Cuba again, you know. And you have to wonder, what sort of domestic blowback would John F. Kennedy have gotten if he had done what he did now. You know, if he had said those things now, people would have said, he's weak, people would have said, I don't know, he's an isolationist, people would have thrown all sorts of mud at him for essentially acknowledging that, you know what, when you have an adversary who has a massive nuclear arsenal, you need to treat them differently.

And there are certain risks you just cannot take if you're being responsible. And I think some of the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis have really been lost over the decades. I think it's really concerning. And I think that some of the stone cold realism that people had during the Cold War, which led to some bad things to be clear. But I think there was an awareness around the dangers of nuclear weapons and about avoiding a class. between great powers in a way that in previous generations wouldn't have been an existential threat and it became one in the nuclear era and I see that right now that there's an effort to downplay those dangers and I think it's really really really scary to watch yeah and you know you just reminded me

of another Kennedy quote although I can't find it but I'll find it later where he said and it was during the debate in the XCOM over the Cuban missile crisis I think where he said look one nuke if it went off in, I forgot what he said, Philadelphia or D.C. or whatever, he picked a city, I think. He said, you know, or maybe it was New York, one nuke goes off. That'll kill 600,000 people. And he said, that's how many we lost in the Civil War. And we haven't gotten over that in a hundred years. That's a good one. I need that for the book. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. That's powerful. Yeah. And that's just one nuke. That's devastation. on what anybody could imagine you know i i talked to a guy one time years ago where you know he had

helped model this out and whatever at his job and he was i guess had lived in austin before so he knew austin and he goes well you know one h bomb over austin would kill everybody from breaker lane to slaughter lane in other words from the very north of austin to the very south you'd be all dead all yeah one shot that's all it takes and so two or three like that would kill all of Houston, you know, and if you just had, like, low, like, one or two megatons, or, like, you know, say hi, kill a tons. You'd kill all a Houston, all of Dallas, which is one or two of those things. And everybody had to burn everybody to dust.

And it's just, it's so unimaginable that people can't imagine it. Or it's so unimaginable that if they can't imagine it, they can't imagine that anyone would ever go that far. And so it becomes just not a serious danger, you know? Right. Yeah, the willingness of people to say Putin's bluffing. Maybe he probably is. Actually, he has at certain points in his nuclear bluster. But that doesn't mean that he's going to always be bluffing.

And do you really, really want to play chicken with somebody who has the world's largest nuclear arsenal? Now, that doesn't mean I think that we should just roll over to him and whatever it is that he wants, I think, you know, there's all sorts of nuanced, you know, in-betweens that we can figure out. And it's a good reason to try to engage in vigorous diplomacy, to try to address his, his secure, figure out what are his existential concerns. But the point is, you don't want somebody who has the world's largest nuclear arsenal started to question, you know, if there's an existential threat to them or not. That's not something you want them to have in their head. Right. Absolutely right. So I found it. That's the total number of cash. In the Civil War, well, I'll rewind one.

The generals assured Kennedy in October, the United States enjoyed overwhelming nuclear superiority over its adversary and could easily wipe the Soviet Union off the map. But this did not comfort the President, who asked the obvious question, how many Americans would die if just one Soviet missile landed on U.S. soil? The answer was 600,000. Quote, that's the total number of casualties in the Civil War. JFK exploded, quote, and we haven't got over that in a hundred years. And he later acknowledged that the 24 intermediate range Soviet missiles in Cuba constituted a substantial deterrent to me. Yeah, sounds about right.

What an unreasonable and radical position to be deterred by hydrogen fusion bombs, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, now we would say, you know, that's what appeasement looks like. Exactly. He's clearly the Manchurian candidate. We need seven days in May to save us. We have John Brennan and James Clapper accuse him of being a Russian agent and fixing the election in 1960 for him. I've seen that movie before, a couple of them.

Listen, what time is it? Oh, no, I got to go, but I don't want to because I still wanted to ask you something. But anyway, I'll have to apologize for ranting all over your interview because I wanted to ask you, I will at least mention. I want to ask you about this great article you did with our friend Ben Freeman, it's called pro bono ukraine lobbyists quietly profit from defense contractor clients and uh this is a really good one and didn't i highlight in here you had something i never heard of which is some is it a new law that's going to try to restrict foreign funding of think tanks that's been proposed here yeah there there is a new law it would uh that's being proposed

it wouldn't uh it wouldn't i don't think it would prohibit uh foreign funding of think tanks but it would require nonprofits who receive foreign government funding to disclose that fact. Just as a general rule, there's no legal designation for a think tank, something people generally kind of don't know. Most think tanks are 501C3 nonprofits. So this is trying to address it in actually, I think, at a practical manner, to say, listen, we're not going to get into the games of saying, what's a think tank, what isn't, what we're going to have to say is that if they move forward with such legislation, it would be to essentially

require nonprofits that take foreign government money to simply disclose it. Full stop. No questions about whether or not they're acting as an agent of a foreign government, which would be under the FARA statute, which would still exist. But this would just be saying, as a blanket rule, if you're receiving that funding, you just got to disclose it, period. Oh, Eli, that's a Russia style law. Exactly. I learned that this week, that if anyone copies America's Foreign Agent Registration Act, then it's a Russia style law. because America has to be able to intervene in everybody else's country

and overthrow their government whenever we want. Yeah. It's very important priority of ours. Listen, you do such great work, and I'm so grateful that you and Trita and Andrew Basevich and, well, first of all,

that you three founded this thing and that you brought the heroic and wonderful Kelly Vlehos to be your editor over there and that you guys are doing such a great job putting out anti-war stuff over there at responsiblestatecraft.org. There's a reason we find something

to run. from you every single day over at anti-war.com, as I'm sure you've noticed. So I appreciate all your great efforts. As always, Eli. Thank you so much. Hell yeah. Take care, bud. Take it easy. All right, you guys, that's Eli Clifton. And this one is called pro bono Ukraine lobbyist, quietly profit from defense contractor clients. And before that, Ukraine war is great for the portfolio as defense stocks enjoy a banner year. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.