Episode 213: “It’s High Time for a Ceasefire in Ukraine” with Stephen Bryen and David P. Goldman
Release Date: 01/31/2023
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: "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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
info_outlineAs 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.
The stakes could not be higher.
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.
Washington is facing dangerous choices.
“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?”
“Reality is starting to set in a little bit in Europe that the next Russian target is not going to be in Ukraine. It's going to be in Europe.”
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.”
So here we are. Ukraine is being reduced to rubble. Russia is not going to be a liberal democracy.
“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.
Will Russia be willing to sit down and discuss a deal?
Stephen and David have a surprising candidate from within the Administration who might be able pull it off.