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Episode 182: "Are We Misreading Putin's War Aims" with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry

The Bill Walton Show

Release Date: 04/19/2022

Episode 227:  “It’s Time for the US to Use Its Power to Bring the War in Ukraine to an End” with Stephen Bryen show art Episode 227: “It’s Time for the US to Use Its Power to Bring the War in Ukraine to an End” with Stephen Bryen

The Bill Walton Show

The war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Some estimate that there have been almost 400,000 total Russian and Ukraine casualties so far, although both sides claim their losses are much lower.  Ukraine is on the ropes and running out of manpower with its most of its elite forces destroyed. Missiles for its air defenses are depleted. Both sides are dragooning teenagers and old men for their armies. Russia’s military command is in disarray.  But no one knows what is really going on. A key problem understanding the war in Ukraine is...

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Episode 226: Episode 226: "The Weaponization of Loneliness" with Stella Morabito

The Bill Walton Show

“Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.”  — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism “Americans have long sensed a new kind tyranny creeping into our lives. This disquiet has hovered in the background for a long time, though most of us couldn’t put our finger on it.  Trends to control speech and behavior are isolating us from one another, and they have begun to intensify rapidly and spread throughout society’s...

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Episode 225: “Protecting Investors from an Overreaching Regulatory State” with Chris Iacovella show art Episode 225: “Protecting Investors from an Overreaching Regulatory State” with Chris Iacovella

The Bill Walton Show

When Walmart went public in 1970 and soon thereafter listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its SEC disclosure prospectus was 20 pages long.  Today, a prospectus requires massive numbers of mostly obscure disclosures imposing very real liabilities for the issuing company - but which no one reads, except for lawyers who charge $2,000 an hour to read it and to write it - and which can run upwards to 300 pages or more.  Under President Joe Biden’s whole of government effort to weaponize federal agencies, this regulatory creep has become an outright onslaught of new regulations. Except...

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Episode 224: “The FBI’s Ambitious New Plans” with J. Michael Waller show art Episode 224: “The FBI’s Ambitious New Plans” with J. Michael Waller

The Bill Walton Show

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is proceeding with plans to build a new headquarters which would be twice the size of the The Pentagon, the world’s largest office building. The new FBI headquarters is to be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres. The Kremlin in Moscow —a walled fortress containing the administrative offices of the Russian central government, the official presidential residence, massive auditoriums, an arsenal, a museum, four palaces, three cathedrals and several churches—is just over 66...

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Episode 223: The Differences Between Men and Women: Warriors and Worriers with Joyce Benenson show art Episode 223: The Differences Between Men and Women: Warriors and Worriers with Joyce Benenson

The Bill Walton Show

What are the evolutionary differences between men and women, and how do they survive and thrive through differing competitive strategies? In this episode, Dr. Joyce Benenson talks with Bill about her book, Warriors and Worriers, which draws her extensive lifelong research on children’s interactions. The result is fascinating array of studies and stories that explore the ways boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders. Dr. Benenson, a retired professor of psychology at Emmanuel College and an associate...

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Episode 222: “What You Need to Know About Your Money and the Federal Reserve” with Cato’s Norbert Michel show art Episode 222: “What You Need to Know About Your Money and the Federal Reserve” with Cato’s Norbert Michel

The Bill Walton Show

Is the Federal Reserve a godlike Zeus able to control our money and the economy, preserve financial stability and keep a lid on inflation?  Or is it like the Wizard of Oz? A little man behind the curtain pulling levers to create smoke and noise to terrify and control people, but in the end only one market participant among many worldwide.  If you’re a bond trader in New York, trying to predict minute day to day changes in interest rates, it’s more like Zeus. For the rest of us, I believe, it’s like Oz.  Trying to figure out the Fed is a complicated business and I'm...

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Episode 221: “Are We Really Surprised We’re Having Another Banking Crisis?” with Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey show art Episode 221: “Are We Really Surprised We’re Having Another Banking Crisis?” with Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey

The Bill Walton Show

It looks like the bill is finally coming due after decades of reckless monetary policy and out of control federal spending. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation. Interest rates have risen dramatically. Mortgage rates have more than doubled. And commercial banks are now sitting on more than $600 billion of unrealized bond losses.  Of course, and as expected, with the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, the Regulators have pulled out their default playbook declaring yet another institution systematically risky, taking another step toward the federalization of...

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Episode 220: “Silicon Valley Bank: The Bill Finally Comes Due for Decades of Reckless Monetary, Fiscal and Regulatory Policy” with Rick Manning and Robert Romano show art Episode 220: “Silicon Valley Bank: The Bill Finally Comes Due for Decades of Reckless Monetary, Fiscal and Regulatory Policy” with Rick Manning and Robert Romano

The Bill Walton Show

This week, Americans for Limited Government published a provocative and insightful piece about the banking system asking, "Has the United States banking system become too big to save?”   In the past three years, to finance massive federal spending, the Treasury has issued almost $8 trillion new treasury bonds with almost $4 trillion bought by US banks during the tail-end of the Fed’s era of zero interest rates.    US Treasury Bonds? Sounds like a safe investment for a bank, but here’s the problem. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation...

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Episode 219: “The Labor Department’s Radical Agenda” with Pat Pizzella show art Episode 219: “The Labor Department’s Radical Agenda” with Pat Pizzella

The Bill Walton Show

Under President Joe Biden and his Administration the whole of government has been weaponized to promote a so-called Diversity Equity and Inclusion agenda that, in fact, will bring about just the opposite of what these words mean.  Case in point is an assertive, left-wing, anti-family Department of Labor with its power to regulate and attempt to social engineer virtually every aspect of the American workplace.  Congress has granted it a stunning amount of power to administer more than 180 federal laws and thousands of regulations affecting more than 10 million employers and 150...

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Episode 218: “The Ugly Truth About the White House, the FBI and the Social Media Companies” with Jenin Younes and Todd Zywicki show art Episode 218: “The Ugly Truth About the White House, the FBI and the Social Media Companies” with Jenin Younes and Todd Zywicki

The Bill Walton Show

Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media.    Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily as the government has claimed.    The emails emerged last month in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private...

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This episode is a follow-up to my conversation a few weeks ago with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry about our concerns that our Administration’s responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to nuclear war.
 
Today, we consider also an alternate possibility that Vladimir Putin is playing a much deeper game than most in the West have imagined.
 
As Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, former Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP Commission and Director of the US Nuclear Strategy Forum, Dr Pry brings a vast and imaginative knowledge of history and of modern warfare.
“Most analysts, including myself, thought that the relevant scenario was Crimea and that the Russians would go for a quick, almost bloodless, victory,” speculates Peter, “but there is another Russian way of war that was right under our noses. And that is a long protracted war …  it's almost like they're deliberately doing everything they can to try to provoke the West to intervene, to jump into the war.”
There are a lot of strange things in the way the Russians have conducted the Ukraine War that have violated most all of the fundamental elements of their military doctrine.
 
They didn't go for tactical and strategic surprise. They attacked openly in the face of the West. They haven’t cyber attacked although the Russians have demonstrated the ability to isolate their cyber attacks to Ukraine itself.
 
They haven't committed some of their best conventional forces. Their best and most modern tanks haven't been committed to Ukraine. Of their 20,000 tanks they’re using mostly older models and only a small fraction of those.
“The Russian air force has almost been absent without leave, hasn't been deployed in its best capabilities,” explains Peter, “and has played a very limited role.”
Why?
 
We need to consider the possibility that this whole thing right from the beginning might not be just about Ukraine.
“It might be aimed at creating a long period of chaos in the center of Europe,” reasons Peter, “that it’s going to put such stress on its economies and the NATO Alliance that the NATO Alliance will come apart at the seams.”

Putin isn't returning phone calls from the White House and Russian general staffs are not talking to our Pentagon. 

“They've basically stopped communicating with us,” says Peter. “That isn't the action of a country that's badly losing a war and is desperately seeking an exit.”
 
We should be cautious about what we believe of what we're being told in Ukraine and about the performance of the Russian army.
 
We’re told Russia is on the ropes, that it looks like it could lose the Ukraine War, Putin could fall from power and that he and the elites who support him and his family could be executed.
 
But consider this: Putin has postured Russia’s nuclear arsenal in such a way that they can launch most of their forces in just a few minutes without telegraphing any messages to us.
 
This a time for America to stop saber rattling and develop a sober considered strategy to defuse the Ukraine tinderbox.
 
Dr Peter Vincent Pry outlines some sensible and constructive strategies to wind down the hostilities, up to and including hitting the reset button with Russia, reminding us that our real object in our new Cold War is China.
 
There’s a lot to learn from this conversation. Please listen in.