The Bill Walton Show

The Biden Administration - and a majority of Republicans in Congress - persist in their bellicose rhetoric about an "existential war to defend Ukraine" telling the Russians that "we're going to destroy your regime and dissolve the Russian Federation." Really? After sending more than $100 billion to Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia, have they thought through whether the US is capable of doing this? They are calling for actions that only a global hegemon might possess. But a hegemon that no longer controls its own borders, has crumbling critical infrastructure, hollowed out military capabilities and is $33 trillion in debt is no longer a hegemon. This is an Administration that left $87 billion of U.S. military equipment behind when it bolted from Afghanistan, let a Chinese surveillance ballon pass unmolested over the entire Continental United States and is led by a Commander in Chief who daily elicits ever stronger labels for cognitive impairment. It is not to be trusted to lead ever more aggressive actions against Russia and tempt the possibility of nuclear war. Instead, Americans should demand that we seek to bring about a negotiated peace - if that is even still possible. To sort out where the war stands now, and how we might bring it to an end, two experienced and insightful observers, Dr. Stephen Bryen and David P Goldman have returned as guests to follow up on our conversation of a few weeks ago. Stephen Bryen is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute and David Goldman is the Spengler columnist and Deputy Editor for Asia Times and PJ Media. David is also the Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute. Stephen has over 50 years national security experience including several stints in the Pentagon where he was known as the Yoda of the arms trade. "The global utopians, led by the likes of Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland, have plunged us into a war which could take us into a real catastrophe," says David. Already, they've let take root a Russian coalition with China, Iran, North Korea, and perhaps Turkey and India. Whether or not Vladimir Putin made a costly mistake in invading Ukraine, the big battles right now are going badly for the Ukrainians and the Russians have solidified their gains. "The Ukrainians are out of ammunition," says Stephen. "They're out of air power. They're out of air defenses. Their artillery is running low and it's a grim situation for them." By escalating and destroying major Russian infrastructure, you risk widening the war in Europe. And this is not a war, at least a conventional war, that the United States could win. "I don't think the United States can fight in Ukraine at present without building up all the logistics, all the capabilities," explains Stephen. "It would take years. It's not going to happen." "American forces haven't fought a peer in a long time," reminds David. "The Ukrainians probably fight a lot better than any American unit could at this point, who have only fought goat herders for the past 40 years. So I'm not sure how well American troops would perform, and that would be a real risk to take." Pursuing this dangerous anti-Russian agenda is not in the best strategic interests of the United States. "We need a realist foreign policy. Donald Trump, of whom I have a long list of criticisms, managed to get out of office with no real important conflicts with the Russians, with a peace agreement between Israel and some of the Gulf states, and a generally stable world." "I wish this could be settled. It is crying out for a political settlement. It's absolutely crying. It's in our international interests, in our strategic interests, in our leadership interests in the world, which is all important, that we settle this thing," warns Stephen. "And the lack of desire by Biden and his people, all of them, to want to settle it, is really disgraceful." This view - one I share - won't be found in most of the mainstream media. You may or may not agree with our conclusions, but you should hear the arguments.

Backstage with Bill Walton

In this episode I compare notes and share stories with veteran dealmaker and entrepreneur Marc Morgenstern.

In today's polarized world, where people seem intent on not agreeing, Marc has had a long and successful career helping opposing sides come to agreement.

He's completed billions of dollars of M&A transactions, buying, selling, and financing businesses as a managing partner of law firm Kahn Kleiman and as a venture capitalist.

Marc's new book The Soul of the Deal: Creative Frameworks for Buying, Selling, and Investing in Any Business creatively reframes and radically changes how we can approach dealmaking of any type.

Marc is a brilliant synthesist who weaves in, for example, what he's learned as a successful door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, as a leader of several rock bands in college (Yale) and as a lifelong fan of The Grateful Dead.

He's come to believe - and I think this is right - that much of the conflict in dealmaking comes from seeing the other side as an opponent. They'd do better to listen like musicians rather than as lawyers.

"When you saw the Dead over time in many different venues, in many different cities, a thousand seats to a hundred thousand seats, you realize that they took into account, whether it's conscious or unconscious, that this is a different audience, these are different acoustics. I'm in a better mood, I'm in a worse mood. It doesn't matter," explains Marc.

"So the fact that you played something five nights ago one way, doesn't mean you're going to play it that way tonight."

"In the deal world, I think of each counterparty as my audience and in every deal I've got a different counterparty with different needs."

A wise and creative man, Marc's also has taught at UC Berkeley and is on the boards of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Rex Foundation, which was started by members of the Dead.

This is a fun and enlightening conversation and Marc has a lot to teach us. Backstage and off the beaten path.

For an excellent primer about how the politics of our over-complicated state and local tax systems operate, this conversation with Grover Norquist is absolutely the place to start.

It's comprehensive, easy to understand and often humorous, as only Grover knows how to make it.

(When Grover is not doing taxes, he's doing stand-up comedy. For real, and he's good at it.)

As founder of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle, no one in modern times has fought harder than Grover Norquist to shrink the state by keeping the issue of high taxes and IRS abuses in the public eye.

To my delight, I learn that there are some good things taking place at the state level, where many states are either getting rid of their income tax altogether or moving to a flat tax. Grover explains where and how this is happening, with ATR playing a leading role.

"Americans for Tax Reform," explains Grover, "hosts frequent conference calls among the various governors and legislative leaders. We're creating a community where each of the governors understands fully well that most other Republican governors are phasing down to zero or significantly cutting tax."

"How does Florida pay for it? Florida 22 million people. New York, 20 million. Florida spends a $100 billion on state government. It's a lot, a $100 billion. New York, twice as much, 200 billion."

"But the roads aren't any better up in New York. Public safety and cops aren't any better. Schools aren't any better. They hire more government employees, pay them more and have ridiculous pensions. That's what you get for twice the cost of state government. New York wouldn't need an income tax if they spend half as much. So the key is spending restraint."

Of course politicians have figured out a lot of other ways to tax us besides the income tax. Sales taxes. Property taxes. Excise taxes. Capital gains taxes. Cigarette taxes. Estate taxes. Alcohol taxes. Disguised taxes (aka licensing fees). And on and on.

We get into these and learn how for example "red states have gotten suckered into subsidizing their blue cities."

One big takeaway: A simple tax system is the friend of the taxpayer. Complicated tax systems? The more confusing and opaque, the more governments love them. Grover explains why having a single tax rate makes it tougher for them to raise taxes.

"All taxes are raised to the breaking point, to the point where politicians careers are broken."

Also discussed in this episode: the FAIR tax which aims to eliminate the IRS, school vouchers, Janet Yellin's quest for an international minimum corporate tax, what to negotiate for in the debt ceiling fight and the significance of ATR's no tax increase pledge.

Listen in. There's much to learn here.

Events are picking up pace rapidly on the world stage and I've asked my frequent guest Brandon Weichert to join me to help explain what's happening. Brandon, geopolitical analyst and publisher of The Weichert Report, is among the best at connecting the dots globally with his bold and unnerving forecasts. Among the many issues brewing that we get into: Russia is amassing up to 400 thousand troops on Ukraine's borders for a winter offensive, objectives unknown. Nuclear escalation looms. The Chinese sent a satellite balloon hovering ominously across the entire United States as it presumably took surveillance photos. Strangely, the Biden Administration, which is all in to defend the borders of Ukraine, refused to protect America's own airspace. Why wasn't it shot down sooner? Our southern border with Mexico has been left wide open for over two years. The United States' enemies - and its friends - have watched us admit almost five million undocumented aliens, whose purposes and destinations are unknown. South Korea's president is having a public meltdown about no longer having reliable American nuclear protection. He has reason to be concerned. Joe Biden, just two weeks ago, declared that "global warming is the single most existential threat to humanity we have ever faced, including nuclear weapons." Did the way Biden fail to confront the Chinese balloon sooner than he did reflect this priority? Brandon conjectures: "A political decision in the White House was made to let it just pass by quietly because the Biden administration didn't want to rock the boat going into their global warming negotiations with China. They worried that if they shot it down, that the Chinese would freak out and leave the meeting before anything could get done". "If it wasn't for a local Montana newspaper, we wouldn't have known about any of this. This would have been just another conspiracy theory on the internet." With Ukraine, United States strategic objectives could have been the preservation of the Ukrainian core in the western portion of the country and a speedy end to the fighting. Instead, the Biden administration continues to insist that Ukraine drive the Russians completely out. If this means sending in U.S. combat jets and long range missiles, the massive risk is that this widens the war, triggering our NATO agreements, leading to a general - and possibly nuclear - war in Europe. The German general von Clausewitz told us that "war is an extension of politics through other means." Well, politics and our politicians seem to have gone mad. Worryingly, the United States is playing a weaker and weaker hand. Brandon warns that "America's political and cultural system is collapsing here at home. The rest of the world sees that. Especially in China, they talk about this all the time. China believes the Americans are declining." There's a lot to unpack in this episode. Please listen in.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, it's nearly impossible for the ordinary observer to figure out what's really happening.

One of the problems is that war news is generated primarily by Ukrainian propaganda, which is endlessly parroted in the Western media. Anytime there is contradictory information – for example, mention of Ukraine's high casualties – Kiev pushes back so hard that Western leaders go silent.

But what is clear is that looming on the horizon is the very real possibility of a nuclear war, as more and more European countries are drawn in to the conflict.

To understand what's happening as the Ukraine situation grows more dire, I'm joined on this episode by my frequent guest Dr. Stephen Bryen, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and by David P. Goldman - Spengler columnist and Deputy Editor for Asia Times and PJ Media.

Stephen has over 50 years national security experience that includes serving as Senior Staff Director of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and several stints in the Pentagon where he was known as the Yoda of the arms trade.

David is also the Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute and has vast subject matter expertise and has written extensively on international affairs and security matters.

This was a disturbing conversation framed in part by US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley's recent statement that "it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from Ukraine in 2023" and that the casualties on both sides are very high.

"This is something that Ukrainians keep trying to hide, but it's not a symmetrical conflict. It's an asymmetrical conflict," explains Stephen. "The Russian side is much heavier, much bigger, more troops, more capabilities. In a war of attrition, Ukraine loses."

"A few dozen tanks are not going to really make any difference in the strategic balance," concurs David.

"Ukrainians have fought very well and very hard, and they've been, from a command and control point of view, superior to the Russians overall, but remember that the troops they started with are not the troops they have now."

Among Ukraine's urgent call for more weapons is a 100-mile ground-launched long-range bomb known as ATACMS which would shift the war from Ukrainian to Russian territory. Putting this sort of weapon in Ukrainian hands will likely result in a wider war in Europe. And the US decision to ship upgraded nuclear bombs to Europe leads the Russians to conclude that a tactical nuclear war may be NATO's response if Ukraine collapses.

"Should it commit US forces or US air power to Ukraine?" asks Stephen. "If it did so, how quickly would the war spread in Europe? Would NATO, always far more boisterous than can be justified by reality, support sending NATO forces to Ukraine? Or would NATO's knees finally buckle?"

David says it's time for a gut check: "The United States should step back and ask what our strategic interests are. Do we have an existential or even an important strategic interest in Ukraine?"

"The Biden Administration, personified by Victoria Nuland, believes with religious fervor that Russia is destined to be a liberal democracy and that our goal in one way or another should be regime change, to get rid of Putin."

But from the Russian's perspective, explains Stephen, "They lost their entire buffer, which was their award for winning a big part of World War II, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russians extracted promises from us that we wouldn't expand NATO further, and certainly not to Ukraine, and we broke those promises. Absolutely broke those promises."

"By making this a war effectively for regime change and threatening the Russians with not just asset seizures, but also war crimes and tribunals, this has caused everyone to rally around Putin," David warns. "If we wanted to ensure his absolute leadership there, we couldn't have done it better."

The Russians firmly believe that the only negotiation is with Washington. It's time for some grown up diplomacy and for Washington to push for what up until now it has strictly opposed: a peace settlement.

Stephen and David have a surprising candidate from within the Administration who might be able pull it off.

"This whole climate hysteria seems to focus on a molecule - carbon dioxide (CO2) - which we humans exhale and which we release into the atmosphere by burning so-called fossil fuels," explains my guest on this episode Jerome Corsi, PhD.

But what are realities of CO2, who is behind the agenda to demonize it and - most importantly - who benefits?

Dr. Corsi, author of the tour de force book The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, has the answers.

Drawing extensively on scholarly published peer-reviewed literature in the fields of climate science, geology, astronomy, energy physics, and statistical methodologies, Dr. Corsi reframes the CO2 global warming argument from the realm of politics to the sphere of science where the discussion properly belongs.

He also exposes the political, scientific, and economic reasons for concluding that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an advocacy creation of the United Nations that masquerades as a scientific research community to push climate hysteria for globalist political purposes.

Created by the United Nations in 1988, the IPCC has led the "consensus science" effort to advance the argument that man-made CO2 emissions resulting from burning hydrocarbon fuels are "causing a climate change disaster of unprecedented proportions."

Yet aiming for "net zero carbon emissions" by eliminating hydrocarbons and mandating wind and solar power, will essentially shut down a modern economy that has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

The IPCC itself concedes this.

Its 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming warns that "limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require "rapid and far-reaching" transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching 'net zero' around 2050. Limiting warming to 1.5°C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes. The effectiveness of such techniques are unproven at large scale and may carry significant risks for sustainable development"

What's happening now is not about the climate, energy, or the environment. Instead, an unscientific and purposeful climate scare is being perpetrated by a new class of power elites to impose their will and right to rule over the rest of us. It is a backdoor way for progressives to impose central planning, socialism, and progressivism on once-free democracies.

"They had to find something that created an existential threat," observes Jerry, "where they could warn 'we're all going to die unless you do what we say.'"

It is also about money. About three quarters of the money that President Obama spent on green energy went to people who were on his finance committee. Under President Biden, trillions have flowed to the green energy lobby, benefiting almost entirely Democrat donors.

These are strong statements but the more you dig into the faux science and the unstated agenda of the climate change regime, the more they ring true.

Dr. Jerome Corsi received a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has published over twenty-five books on economics, history, and politics, including six New York Times bestsellers, two at #1 "Unfit For Command" and "The Obama Nation"

Jerry is an erudite and charming guide to climate realities. Well worth a listen. I believe his book will become a must-read classic.

(By the way, you'll be relieved to learn that, contrary to what AOC and Greta Thunberg believe, we're not burning the mystical remains of long dead dinosaurs as "fossil fuels." Jerry explains why.)

If someone wanted to weaken, then destroy a sovereign and free United States, what would they do?

Well they might start with surrendering its energy independence. Make war on reliable fossil fuels oil and gas, coal and nuclear power.

Induce it to rely on wind and solar energy sources that are certain to lead to rolling blackouts and the ultimate failure of America's electrical grid. And while they're at it, persuade America to rely on China for most all of its wind and solar energy production technologies.

Inflate its currency. Have the Federal Reserve print trillions of dollars of money out of thin air to finance insane levels of federal spending, much of it going to a so-called "green energy" lobby.

Destroy public trust in its elections. Make Election Day a thing of the past. Normalize a voting system that coughs up over 100 million unaccountable mail-in ballots.

Demonize the idea of America as a melting pot and encourage tribalism, based on race, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation. Have these tribes band together to oppose a supposed "white privilege" majority. Racially discriminate to end discrimination.

Open its borders. End any difference between citizens and residents.

Muzzle speech. Cancel or shadow-ban anyone who questions the "consensus" about January 6, the efficacy of Covid vaccines or election integrity.

Weaponize the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice.

All these things are happening. This list could go on and on. The patterns are there. The questions become: is there a plan and who is behind it?

For some answers, I've turned to Kevin D. Freeman, my guest on this episode, who has written an all-encompassing new book - According to Plan, the Elite Secret Plan to Sabotage America.

Kevin's considered one of the world's leading experts on economic warfare and financial terrorism. He is a co-founder and host of the Economic War Room on BlazeTV and of the National Security Consultant Institute. Kevin also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy.

In According to Plan, Kevin Freeman lays out a clear case that the current attack is an intentional one aimed at all the pillars of freedom that have made America great.

"I wrote According to Plan to show that there is a pattern," explains Kevin. "A equals B, B equals C. Isolated facts don't persuade, but showing people the pattern can."

Join us on the episode to learn about the disturbing patterns - the plan - and the people behind them.

"Commuting to office work is obsolete. It is now infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to do what the 19th century could not do, move information, and with it office work to where the people are, the tools to do so are already here. The telephone two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, and so on."

Peter Drucker (1989)

In 2020, over 30 years later, futurist and management guru Peter Drucker's prediction came true with a bang. With the mandated COVID lockdowns, suddenly everybody had to learn to work from home. Office occupancy plummeted from 90% to 10% and we all learned about how to Zoom. Since then people are going back to the office, but occupancy still averages only 40 to 50% depending on the market, and in New York lower.

So what's going to happen next? In this episode, I talk with commercial real estate expert extraordinaire John Scheurer about the prospects for office work and office buildings. John heads the real estate investing arm of Siguler Guff and was formerly CEO of Allied Capital after leading its very successful commercial real estate business.

"What COVID forced us to do is cram 50 years' worth of commuting to the office to working wherever you wanted to work into two years" explains John.

One big beneficiary of the office exodus has been residential housing prices, which rose in some markets up to 50% fueled by people wanting to get bigger houses so they can have a home office.

With people not wanting to return to the office, demand for office leases has collapsed from 250 million square feet of office space signed for in 2019 to about 50 million in 2022.

Microsoft is reportedly giving up office in Seattle - a million square feet of space - and Reebok and hundreds of big companies have concluded to dramatically cut back as well. Allstate is getting rid of their suburban Chicago campus, because 75% of their people are now working remotely.

So this is an interesting story about how businesses and markets adapt to changing fortunes. Will empty office buildings be converted to condos? Will tech workers be lured back to work with promises of private offices? Did businesses need all those employees to begin with?

After all, Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter's so-called workers and its seems to be operating just fine.

One of the fascinating aspects of this story is how entrepreneurs take advantage of distressed markets and can turn despair into opportunity. With the prices of office buildings falling, is this actually a good time to invest?

John and I also talk about what's happening to hotel and retail properties, and where the future is not as bleak as it looked just a couple of years ago.

I asked John where he would invest today and his answers were intriguing.

In 1974, with annual inflation raging over 12%, President Gerald Ford introduced WIN ("whip inflation now") buttons telling Americans: "To help increase food and lower prices, grow more and waste less. To help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less." In other words, the responsibility to fix inflation fell to ordinary Americans. It didn't work - because they didn't cause it in the first place - and it would be another eight years before Fed Chairman Paul Volcker tamed the inflation beast. With draconian measures, like draining bank reserves, the Fed funds rate rose to 19.1% and mortgage rates reached over 18%. Volcker's "remedy" engineered not one severe recession but two of them, back to back. Today, a "WIN" button might stand for "Why Inflation Now?" The many explanations include: the explosion of Federal spending and the money supply, Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine war, the economic disruptions caused by Covid policy lockdown, the war on fossil fuels and (my favorite) claims from MSNBC commentators that Republicans have invented the term inflation for political purposes. In this episode my frequent guest John Tamny and I debate whether today's out-of-control inflation has been caused by a massive increase in federal spending and paid for by the Federal Reserve's printing money. Or By the destruction of critical elements of our real productive economy caused by governments' coercive lockdowns and other measures taken in 2020 and 2021 to stop a covid virus, which in the end, came anyway. Notice that both explanations lay the blame at the doorstep of government policymakers. Both explanations probably play a part, although John, reliable contrarian that he is, believes only the second is the real reason. John Tamny, Vice President of FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Market Institute is the author of the recently published The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy About Currencies and Inflation Sets the Stage for a Crypto Revolution Vastly oversimplified, there are essentially two types of inflation. "Non-monetary" inflation where price increases are driven by rising demand for products and services that occurs naturally in markets. The other type is "monetary" inflation, resulting from central bank money printing or other events that cause currencies to lose value. The Money Explanation: At $30 trillion, our Federal debt now exceeds the size of the entire US economy with much of this massive obligation being financed by the Federal Reserve buying Treasury bonds that it pays for with money it creates out of thin air. This has unleashed an ocean of dollars into the economy. From 2020 to mid 2021, the money supply exploded by more than 35 percent, exceeding an astonishing $ 20 trillion. The result: inflation with the average American losing $8,500 in purchasing power in the last year. The Shutdown of the Economy Explanation: Higher prices in the aftermath of crushing lockdowns weren't caused by government spending or "money supply" but instead were the logical consequence of impairing the interconnectedness of the market that makes ever-falling prices a possibility in the first place. "To be clear" John explains, "higher prices did reveal themselves in 2021 and 2022 but there's a big difference between rising prices born of currency devaluation versus the imposition of command-and-control. The latter is not inflation." Listen to our brief back and forth and you decide.

The world has suffered and continues to suffer catastrophic economic and social damage from the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 - but not from the virus itself.

Rather we're in the midst of a continuing global crisis created by governments' policy responses to the pandemic.

• Trillions of dollars of Federal "relief" spending

• Financed by the Federal Reserve massively increasing the money supply

• And the countless coercive rules and restrictions implemented to stop a Covid virus that came anyway.

The result is the highest inflation in 40 years, which is not slowing down but accelerating. Of course there are other forces at work, like the Biden Administration's war on fossil fuels, but the root causes of inflation were in place before that.

To understand this better and what we need to be concerned about next, in this episode I talk with the great Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of the recently published "Liberty or Lockdown." Our topic: his speech at Hillsdale College and related article about"The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response."

From the beginning - and starting with Donald Trump's response - the idea of "the economy" – viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important – was pitted against public health and lives," reminds Jeffrey.

When governments started declaring some businesses essential and others non-essential what they did not understand is that everything in a economy is interconnected. It's woven. It's never obvious, but if you cut even one thread, all of a sudden the whole fabric can start to unravel. You cannot just turn off an economy and expect that you can restart it with a snap of your fingers.

The same thing was done with medical procedures and treatments and hospital beds. Some were declared "essential", others not. Perversely, spending on healthcare plummeted during the pandemic. Non-virus health conditions worsened and life expectancy in America fell.

"We lost two years of education, substance abuse and addiction rose and hundreds of thousands of businesses were destroyed," says Jeffrey. "Vaccine mandates led to more than a million people being displaced from their jobs."

In the almost three years after the virus emerged from Wuhan China, "we face an economic crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, the longest period of declining real income in the post-war period, a health and educational crisis, an exploding national debt plus inflation at a 40-year high, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets that defies all models, the breakdown of international trade, a collapse in consumer confidence not seen since we started tracking it, and a combustible level of political division."

So here we are. We all need to be deeply concerned about not just this one crisis, but authorities response to the inevitable next "crises" as well.

"To this day, the educated elites in the public health establishment defend every last thing they did. Not a single power that they used to lock us down before has been diminished," worries Jeffrey. "Yes, the courts have cut this policy or that policy a little bit here and there, too little, too late. But in general, all the policy, all the powers that they had before, they have now still, and they will use them again."

We can't afford to sit on the sidelines and let this happen. Listen in as Jeffrey and I explore what happened and what we need to do to prevent it next time.