Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Dick Morris: The Tipping Point Is Here - Frontpagemag.com




by Frontpagemag.com


Veteran political strategist discusses his new book and the dire stakes in the 2016 election.



Frontpage Editor's note: Below are the video and transcript to Dick Morris's address at the David Horowitz Freedom Center's October 5th meeting of the Wednesday Morning Club. 



DICK MORRIS:  I want to focus why I'm saying this is the last election, not that we'll become a dictatorship or anything like that, but three things will happen if Hillary wins, which will be irreversible, in this country.

The first is that 12 million to 15 million currently illegal immigrants will get the right to vote, and the Supreme Court will ratify that, and we [Republicans] will never win another election for 20 years. That's one.

Secondly, about 500,000 to a million immigrants, refugees and immigrants from terror-sponsoring countries, like Iraq and Syria, will come into the United States, creating here a domestic body of potential terrorists equivalent to that which has basically destroyed France and Belgium and is coming very close to destroying Germany, Scandinavia and Britain.  And we didn't have that base of terrorists here before, but they're coming in. 

(Obama just announced that next year he's admitting -- and it's his right as president -- 110,000 new refugees from Iraq and from Syria.)

And when we talk about extreme vetting [regarding these refugees], what the hell does that mean?  We're going to call their high school guidance counselor?  We're going to look at their academic records?  We're going to investigate their college admission files?  These are countries where we don't even have an embassy, and we certainly have no capacity to gather intelligence.  And to be sure of their intentions, we're going to say, "Are you really, really, really, really not going to blow us up?" 

Now, [in the vice presidential debate] in addition to tremendously helping the Trump campaign, the vice presidential candidate for the Democrats said that typing immigrants based on country of origin, as opposed to the content of their character, was un-American and unconstitutional.  Oh, really?  Ever since the Immigration Act of 1926, the entire immigration system of the United States has been based on quotas that vary from nation to nation to nation.  That's been how we do it.  We don't just say the first million people, and then blow a whistle.  We say India can have 33,000.  Pakistan can have 27,000.  Brazil can have 18,000.  And picking and choosing who we want to come to the United States is the core of the immigration policy of the last 100 years.

And during the Clinton administration, and before that the Bush and Reagan administrations, there was a list of countries that are terrorist sponsors.  There was a list of countries that sponsor terrorism, about five or six or seven of them -- North Korea; Cuba; Libya, at the time; Iraq; Iran -- and then a list of about 20 countries that harbor terrorists -- Saudi Arabia and various other countries -- Egypt and a variety of them.  And we had special immigration restrictions on those categories of countries.

Now, when Trump said originally that he wanted to keep Muslim immigrants out of the United States; that was unconstitutional.  We can't have a religious test.  But we can damn well have a geographic one, and that is what Trump is proposing.  That is what Hillary will not do.  And we would then have a seedbed of potential jihadists throughout this country that we will never get rid of.

And the third thing that'll happen is more consequential than the first two.  The tipping point that separates America from Greece and our [other major] cities from Detroit will have been passed.  When Obama took office, 76 million Americans were on Welfare.  That doesn't count Social Security or Medicare or veterans benefits.  That's Medicaid, Section 8 Housing, Food Stamps, Welfare and the like.  Seventy-six million.  That has now gone up to 107 million.  And the number of American adults employed full time was 137 million when Obama took office, and, now, it's 114 million.  So just slightly more people working than collecting.  And if you look at that rate of those lines crossing, they're going to cross soon after Hillary takes office, and then they're going to separate wildly.

And one of the consequences of the dialogue the Congress has had about tax cuts, with the Republicans pushing them and the Democrats say you're just giving it to the rich, is that the conservatives and the Republicans have skewed a lot of their tax cuts toward low- and middle-income taxpayers, and, as a result, huge numbers of people have stopped paying taxes, and you now have a majority of Americans who pay no income taxes.

That, by the way, does not include, at least for the Census Bureau, Donald Trump.  He arrived at it in a different kind of a way.

But the point is that a majority of the American people now don't pay income taxes, and the top 10 percent of the country -- well, the top one percent of the country pays 40 percent of the tax revenues, and the top 10 percent, 80 percent of the tax revenues, a tremendously progressively skewed system.  But that means that they can vote higher spending and higher taxes with complete impunity because none of them are going to pay it.   

Now, let me give you a very specific example of Hillary's tax plans.  If your personal income -- you and your spouse together-- is $200,000, you now pay FICA, Social Security, 13 percent.  If you're self-employed, 6.2; if you're employed, the employer, 6.2, on the first $118,000 of income.

Hillary's proposal, which Kaine reiterated, was to -- quote -- "adjust the cap," which means tax your entire income for Social Security.  So if you make $150,000, let's say, you're going to be paying 12 percent of $30,000 in additional taxes.  If you make $200,000, you'll be paying 12 percent of $70,000, about $10,000 of extra tax payments.  And then add it up, folks.  You have a 40-percent tax bracket maximum.  Then you're going to add 13 percent for self-employment FICA tax with no limit on it.  Then you're going to add three percent Medicare tax.  Then you're going to add state and local taxes, and you're going to be up around a 63 percent tax bracket.  You'll literally be paying two-thirds of your income to the government of each additional dollar you earn.  So unless you have a really interesting alarm clock, why get out of bed?

And that tipping point we're seeing all around us in the massive withdrawal of Americans from the workforce.  We have literally 15 million Americans who have decided not to work for a living during the Obama presidency.

Now, in some cases, that was forced by layoffs, but, in most cases, it was somebody who was laid off, couldn't get another job and just decided they'd retire at 50 or 55 and try to make a go of it, and their immediate thing is to go on cash-transfer payments.

When Ronald Reagan took office, one third of the federal budget was entitlements, cash transfers, money given out.  Now, two-thirds is.  Literally, we have taken welfare and made it truly national and embraced tens and even hundreds of millions of people on it.  And Hillary would just continue that trend.

But the premise of my book is not simply the right against the left, the Republicans against the Democrats.  It's very, very similar to a book by a friend of mine, an odd bedfellow for me, Ralph Nader.  My wife worked very closely with Ralph when he was setting up the Public Interest Research Organization Network and worked closely with him on some of his books.  My wife used to be worse than we are. 

And Nader's latest book is called "Convergence," and he argues that the left and the right in this world are converging, with the enemy being the establishment, the elites and globalists and the global economy.  And I believe that that is true.  I believe it is that phenomenon that impelled the Sanders campaign, the Trump campaign and another campaign I was privileged to work on, the Brexit campaign, because all of those were statements by the victims of the global economy that they want their national leaders to speak for them, not to act as the colonial governor appointed by the UN and the IMF to keep their country in line, which is essentially what Obama has been and what Hillary would be.

And when you think about it, the world has turned totally upside down.  Ninety-plus percent of Wall Street money goes to Hillary, not to Trump, and blue-collar, working-class voters are almost all voting for Trump, if they're white, overwhelmingly for Trump, and it's the college-educated upper-class white voters that are voting for Hillary.

The Democratic Party is now the party of the rich, and the Republican Party is now the party of the working class.  It's distorted a little bit because of race, which is an artifact of past policies, but when you look at the fundamental base of the two parties, you see that change.

And it goes all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. The reason Lincoln opposed slavery was not just that he was morally opposed to it, but he grew up with his father, Tom Lincoln, as a subsistence farmer in a log cabin, subsistence farm where they ate what they grew, and they never had any cash income left to do anything, maybe buy a plow every once in a while, and that's it.  And there was no escaping from it.

Thomas Jefferson idealized that, calling them "Yeomen Farmers," but, now, we see them for what they were, subsistence farmers, and we understand how that's a trap from which you never escape.

But Abe Lincoln found a way to escape.  When he was a young man, very young, he got a job working on a riverboat in the Mississippi River.  And, for the first time, he got a cash income, and he saw that wages were the key to upward mobility, and he went to open a store and save money, and, ultimately, became an attorney and became fairly successful.  By the time he was elected president, he was one of the top utilities lawyers in the country.

But Lincoln understood that you can't have a wage system when five million people can be forced to work for free.  You can't have a wage system with that. 

And Donald Trump understands that you cannot have upward mobility for the wage-earning working class with 12 million to 15 million [Mexican illegal immigrants] willing to work for almost nothing.  It holds the wages down and it stops income growth.  It promotes stagnation, and it creates the very income inequality that the left complains so correctly and so vociferously about.

And the liberals say, "Oh, these are jobs Americans don't want -- landscaping, hospitality, construction."  But that's not true.  The fact of the matter is that over half of the people who hold those jobs are, in fact, American citizens.  We want those jobs.  We just want them to be paid well.  And if there's always someone waiting outside the door who'll do it for half what you'll do it for, you're never going to get upward mobility.  And it is that realization, I believe, that is sparking and kindling the working-class rebellion that is animating the Donald Trump candidacy.  And you combine that with the flip side of it, which are trade deals. 

By the way, just on immigration, I always said that the Republican Party wants immigrants to work, but not vote, and the Democratic Party wants them to vote, but not work.  (Laughter.)  The Democratic Party's unions don't want the competition.  The Republican agro-businesses want the employees, and then there's that dichotomy.

But, now, that's no longer true.  Now, you really have an understanding throughout the entire ranks of the working class Republican Party about the dangerous effect of illegal immigration.

Now, Trump is quoted in this ridiculous, out-of-context quote saying that Mexicans are drug addicts and murderers.  Well, first of all, he said most of the people are very good people.  And some are.  One quarter of the inmates of federal prisons are illegal immigrants, who comprise three percent of America's population.  And they're not in for immigration.  They're in for real crimes.  And 14 percent of state and local prisons in the United States inmates are illegal immigrants.  So it's clear that there is a disproportionate focus on that.

Now, you know, the other day I was on a plane coming in from Europe and I watched "Elvis and Nixon," the movie.  And Elvis used to have a pistol by his night stand, and he'd shoot the TV anytime he didn't like what was on it.  And the next day they had to buy him a new TV, and he'd run through like 50 of them over the course of a year.

Well, I sure felt like shooting the TV in the last couple of debates, most recently when I heard Kaine last night talking about how horrible it would be to have a deportation police force.  Well, in 1995, when I went to work for Clinton in the White House, we talked about immigration policy, and we both agreed that it was terribly important to increase the number of deportations, which, at the moment, were about 110,000 a year.  And we designated an eager young staff member who was ruthless in getting it done, who succeeded by dint of his efforts in increasing the deportations to 280,000 a year.  His name was Rahm Emanuel.

And Obama did them one better.  He raised it to 400,000 a year.  Now, in the last years, when he's going after the Latino vote and pushing immigration reform, he's tailed off and it's now down around 100,000 again.

But the idea of deportation police is something that has always existed and has existed with greater intensity in the Clinton administration than any of the prior Republican administrations.

There's another cute artifact of history.  Do you know that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton built the first wall on the border with Mexico?  Just drive south of here, go south of San Diego, and the entire Mexican-California border is walled off, a 325-mile-long wall, 20 feet high, in many cases, to stop illegal immigrants from coming in.  And it is foolproof.  They come in other ways, but never through that.

And, then, in 2001, when the United States Senate considered legislation to increase the appropriation and build the wall all the rest of the way across the border, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton voted yes and talked about the need for and the importance of a wall.

And I believe that the wall and deportation are key elements of any policy that we can adopt.  Now, of course, we'll have our hands full first with criminal immigrants, the ones that are in prison right now.  At the moment, the policy of the American government is to let them out. 

I just did a story a few weeks ago about a Haitian immigrant who came here 19 years ago illegally, and 17 years ago, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for murder.  And after serving his sentence with no parole, he was let out on parole on a related gun charge.  And when he was released from prison, they notified ICE and said, "This guy is here illegally.  We're letting him out now on the murder rap.  Deport him."

ICE went there, took custody of the guy and then contacted Haiti, from whence he came, and Haiti said, "We don't want him."  And INS said, "Okay.  We'll let him go," which they did.

He then violated his parole, was rearrested, re-incarcerated, re-expelled, rereleased, and ICE again released him onto the streets. 

This happened a third time, and this time he murdered somebody, a 21-year-old woman, a lovely girl, and that was the story I was covering.

And this is the norm now.  There is no method of holding people who have been convicted of crimes who are here illegally.  That's what Sanctuary Cities are all about.  And I would ask you what is the difference between Sanctuary Cities that say, "We're not going to enforce federal immigration laws in New York City," and John C. Calhoun saying, "We're not going to enforce the tariff in South Carolina."  What is the difference between Sanctuary Cities and nullification, the core of the issue that underscored the Civil War?

But in addition to immigration, the other issue that is pressing is trade.  The stats are daunting.  When the United States signed NAFTA and it was approved under the Clinton administration -- and I supported it -- we had a $1 billion trade surplus with Mexico.  We now have a $70 billion trade deficit with Mexico.

When China was let into the World Trade Organization by President Clinton in 1984, we had a $40 billion trade deficit with China.  We now have a $400 billion trade deficit with China.

Now, bear in mind that this doesn't mean all Americans are impoverished by it.  Many are enriched by it.  Two-thirds of the technological exports from China are by American-owned companies.  Half of all Chinese exports are from American- or European-owned companies, not Chinese-owned.

So what's happening, really, is a kind of rebounding effect.  They outsource jobs, are able to manufacture stuff for dirt-cheap wages, subject American workers to a global wage scale, in which case they have to compete with people in Cambodia, and the wealth that they generate is then rebounded to the upper class in the United States through a wildly-inflated and soaring stock market and corporate profits and bonuses.  So it's upward redistribution of income within the United States and within other European countries.

And this gain that goes on, that also funds lobbyists and PR people and all of the acolytes of China and of Mexico, continues, and nobody calls it what it is, trickle up, redistribution of income as a result of our trade policies.

And I think Trump is absolutely right for calling a halt to it.  We're in an era right now where the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944 that opened the world and gave America the lead part in the world and made the dollar the global currency, that agreement was at a time when the United States was two-thirds of the world's GDP.  Now, we're 20 percent.  And at a time when the U.S. overwhelmingly could tolerate and indeed sought immigrants to come into the country.

And the United States, by tolerating trade deficits, was the locomotive that pulled Japan and pulled Germany and pulled South Korea and pulled Taiwan and pulled Singapore and pulled Thailand and increasingly has pulled China out of poverty.

You know the greatest anti-poverty program in the world is capitalism.  Nothing the Pope has done has alleviated poverty nearly as much as capitalism, where 1-1/2 billion people in the world, out of six billion, have been lifted out of poverty from E&D to C&D wage levels, still not luxurious, but not starving and not so poor that they can't afford to buy anything.  But this free-trade system is really hurting the United States.

Now, I have to tell you that I think it's a little bit phony to talk about manufacturing jobs coming back to the United States.  Don't tell Trump I said that, but, come on, in a few years, there will be no manufacturing jobs.  It'll all be done by robots, and we're protecting the jobs of American robots as opposed to Chinese robots. 

The robotic ability means that you no longer have to take the nine parts of your cellphone and produce them in nine different low-wage countries, getting the best rate in each country, and then bring them together and assemble them in a tenth country and sell them in the United States.  You don't have to do that because the robot will work for free, and a lot lower than any wage would be.  And, therefore, you can assemble it right here in the United States.  You can make it here, and, increasingly, we will. 

The volume of global trade has doubled in the last 30 years.  I expected it to halve in the next 20 years, because there will be no need for that global exchange 'cause robotics will replace cheap labor.

How will people live?  How will people make a living?  And the answer is we will move to the service sector, and the manufacturing will go the way of farming, where one percent of our labor force feeds the world, and it'll continue to exist. We'll continue to have great stats, good profits, probably better than we have now, cause there's no reason to outsource, but very little in the way of employment.  And that is the insidious nature of what Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton are doing to the United States. 

There is the TPP, Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement.  Now, understand that 75 percent of the trade of the United States with TPP countries is already free trade.  It's Canada and it's Mexico.  It's NAFTA.  The free trade, no tariffs, free flow of goods is only incidentally the purpose of the TPP.  The real purpose is to set up a global regulation of commerce and industry outside of the spectrum of American laws.  Let me give you an example that would warm any liberal's heart.

We love dolphins, Flipper and everybody, and dolphins were becoming extinct, because tuna fishermen had nets they cast over square miles of ocean and then harvested  everything that's there.  And the tuna couldn't escape, which is fine.  But the dolphins couldn't either, and the dolphin kill was threatening the existence of the species.

So the environmentalists got together and came up with a new net that the dolphin could escape from, but the tuna couldn't.  Then the question was how do you persuade the world's fishing fleets to reequip and pay the extra cost?  So somebody had a brilliant idea.  They went to the American tuna companies and said, "If you buy from companies, fishing fleets that have these new nets, you can put 'Dolphin Safe' on your can of tuna."  If you go home tonight and you look at all your tuna cans, you'll see "Dolphin Safe" on every one of them.  And that has driven the old nets out of business.  Everything is the new net, and the dolphin population is doing just fine.  No governmental action.  All privately done.

Then Mexico sued the United States before the World Trade Organization saying this was an unfair trade practice, because it was benefiting countries that used the nets and opposing countries that did not.  And the WTO, which is the final world on this stuff -- there's no appeal from it -- ruled in favor of Mexico.  And six months from now, none of your tuna cans are going to have "Dolphin Safe" on it, because the World Trade Organization has ruled it, and that supersedes the Congress and the state legislatures, and it's a fiat.  It can't even be done voluntarily.  You go to jail for it.  It's illegal.  World Trade Organization overcame that.  And it's for that kind of global governance that TPP is really being pushed.

But behind TPP is the real villain, the T-I-S-A, TISA, Trade In Services Agreement.  That will do to the service sector in the United States what free trade has done to the manufacturing sector in the United States, because it provides for free flow of labor, and modeled after the European Union, you know, where a Romanian can get a job in London.  [If you go to] Dublin these days -- I just came back -- you don't need any Irishmen waiting on the table or anything or checking in the hotel.  Everybody's Eastern European, and it's because of the free flow of labor.

Well, under this planned free flow -- the treaty is still secret; it's being negotiated, but WikiLeaks published a text of it two months ago -- Sheraton could announce that it is going to ask -- take all of its hotel workers in Latin America and move them to the United States, and they'll be able to come in here regardless of immigration laws, regardless of any restrictions, and, in many cases -- depending on the category of the worker -- not be subject to minimum wage and other protections in the United States.

So you're looking at a plan, essentially, to globalize the labor force in the service sector, just like it's been globalized in the manufacturing sector, and that will mean the erosion of service jobs within the United States, not just manufacturing jobs.

So both trade and immigration are truly issues where the left and the right converge, and they converge no place more accurately than in Hillary Clinton's foundation, where, essentially, it's a sales effort where anybody can bribe the secretary of state or the American government by putting massive amounts of money into that foundation.

[And then there’s] the story of uranium …

Where we essentially gave away 20 percent of our uranium supply to Putin in return for a $1 million speaking fee for Bill.  That pistol, the Elvis Presley pistol, almost was used last night when Kaine began excoriating Trump for his business dealings in Russia.  What's worse than pocketing a $1 million bribe into your joint checking account in return for the secretary of state approving the sale of 20 percent of America's uranium reserve to Russia?  And we're not self-sufficient in uranium.  Our power plants only have about a 40- or 50-day supply.

So in all of these cases, you're dealing really with the merger of the left and the right in their opposition to the global economy, against the establishment.  And that was what happened in Brexit. 

That's actually also what just happened in Colombia, where the peace agreement was rejected.  People are rebelling against the established authorities and saying, "You are not governing in my best interests."  The Colombians could not understand why these animals who had committed unbelievable atrocities would now be given 10 free seats in Congress, and they understood the real reason they were, in Colombia -- I just got hired to do a campaign there -- was because they would have immunity and could not be prosecuted for their crimes while they were rebels.  But people are rebelling against just this kind of governance, which is in the interest of the wealthy, in the interest of the upper class.

My close friend, who's in the audience here, Simon [Barsky], who is my best friend for decades -- so nice that he could come – [he and I] took a course called Contemporary Civilization, and I read a quote that I put in the dedication of my first book, written when I was 30 years old, in 1977, and it was from Daniel [Hartigan], the enlightened economic philosopher, and he said, "The wisdom of the few may be the wisdom of mankind, but the interest of the few is not the interest of mankind."  And that truly summarizes the dogma and the gospel of both the left and the right today.

So when the Bushes and the Romneys and the Kasichs and the McCains do not support Donald Trump -- this is not an occasional defection from the Republican Party akin to those moderates who defected when Barry Goldwater was nominated because he went too far in a lot of respects.  It's not people jumping ship because of Trump's ethics and persona.  It is the logical consequence of the realignment of parties that is taking place, and you now have 20 percent of the Democratic Party voting against Hillary and 20 percent of the Republican Party voting against Trump, and that -- those are both very important and very good things, because they ultimately are presaging the kind of partisan realignment.

Within the Republican Party, it really is the difference between the very wealthy Republicans, the multi-billionaires, the Koch brothers, and the Wall Street magnates, who, for years, dominated the Republican Party, and the coming power in the party, which is the Tea Party, the small businessmen, the independent entrepreneurs, the social conservatives, who do not speak for the establishment and speak for the American people.

And the marvelous thing about Trump is that he is embodying that.  He is bringing that vote out -- the polling in the last week was terrible because he screwed up the debate horribly, and his national numbers were bad, not horrible, but four or five points behind.

But, even so, he was carrying Ohio by five, and he was within three in Pennsylvania.  That's a huge turnaround.  That means the working-class voters in America, the uneducated, downscale, white garage mechanic, who has never voted for 30 years, thinks they were all crooks, won't participate in any political survey, because he's not a likely voter, but he's going to vote for Donald Trump, and he's going to reenter the political process with Joe the Plumber.  Remember him?  He is coming back.  And we're really getting a resurgence here, which is a magnificent opportunity to vindicate the prophesy of Ronald Reagan.  It is to rekindle the Reagan Democrat, who animated the growth of this party and this movement in the 1980s and will continue to do it now.  So I believe Trump is really accomplishing a transformation of our party and of our politics that's very important.

Now, let's spend a moment on the minority votes, starting with African American.  The issue here is not whether Trump wins seven percent of their vote, as Romney did, or 16 percent of their vote, as Bush did.  The issue is what's the turnout. 

Romney lost to Obama by 4.1 points in the popular vote.  Half of that -- two points -- came from the black turnout rising from 11 percent to 13 percent of the vote.  Push it back to 11 percent and he loses half of his margin right away.

And since Hillary's not black and there's not the same level of enthusiasm for her that there was for Obama, as long as there's not a fear of Obama, there's a very good chance of knocking that turnout back.  And it's to try to incite that fear that the Democrats try to enflame racial tensions in cities, the Black Lives Matter movement and all that stuff, which is to try to create a sense of racism and kindle a sense of racism, so it militates for a higher African American turnout.

And, as David [Horowitz] pointed out, in three-quarters of the cases, when they investigate it, the cop was not at fault.  The guy who was killed was, in fact, armed or, in fact, had just committed a felony.  In Ferguson, he'd just robbed a store.  But it is a deliberate policy of the party to enflame those relations to try to jack up the turnout.

But there is an issue that the Democrats did not count on that Donald Trump is using to make huge inroads among African Americans, and that is school choice, which is truly the civil rights issue of our time.  We all know that housing segregation is the norm.  Whites and blacks, except very middle class blacks, do not tend to live in the same neighborhoods.  And if you assign people to the schools based on their zip code, you take that segregation and you put it into the classroom.  You functionally reverse Brown v. Board of Ed. and reinstate Plessy v. Ferguson.  You de-integrate the schools.

And when you add to that the issues of educational quality and getting around the power of the teachers unions to keep incompetent teachers on the job and to maintain control of the system, you see how crucial it is to give people a choice of schools.  Now, Hillary says she's for public school choice, but not for private or church school choices.  In other words, we should not have the same ability to send our children to private schools that Chelsea Clinton had and Obama's children do.  But that issue, which pits the unions and the teachers and the service providers against the service consumers, the parents, really creates a fissure that's enormous.

I do a lot of work on school choice, and I worked with a woman in Washington, D.C., who heads the movement there. I asked her how she got involved.  She is African American, and she said, "I was one of the nine girls who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.  But they had to call out the 82nd Airborne to escort us into school, and I've been spending my life fighting for civil rights."  And it's her line, "This is the civil rights issue of our time."  And Trump recognizes it, and Hillary can't, because she's bound up by her supporters.

Now, when we look at the Latino vote, people often ask me, "When will the Republicans begin to do better in the Latino vote?"  And I answer, "When it's not called that anymore." 

How are we doing with the Polish American vote, huh?  How about the German American vote?  Hum?  Italian Americans?  Irish Americans?  I don't know.  I haven't seen the breakout on that in 40 years.  And that's really where the Latino and Hispanic vote is headed.

There are two kinds of Latino voters in America.  One third of them are immigrants, and they are still voting based on immigration and will vote overwhelmingly for Hillary.

Two thirds are native or born here, and they put immigration fourth in their list of priorities, behind education and jobs and healthcare, and we have a very good chance of very significant inroads with that second group.

So I'm fairly optimistic about this election.  I'm not prepared to predict a win now.  I got in trouble last time.  And there won't be a hurricane this time. 

But I think that we're clearly on the right track.

I want to just speak about a personal note before we go on.  You may know people who you met at the age of 30 and you know them at 70, if you're at that advanced age, as I am.  And they're kind of the same, but they're kind of different.  You know, they had big ears, but not that big.  Their nose was kind of weird, but not that huge.  Over the years, the tendencies have just gotten more and more.

Well, when I worked with the Clintons, they were not fundamentally corrupt.  They did some stuff.  Her work in the futures market was terrible.  It was an outright bribe to exempt Arkansas chicken poultry producers from environmental standards that the EPA was imposing, and, in return for the exemption, Jim Blair, the lobbyist for the industry, paid Hillary a $100,000 bribe by managing her futures trading.  And he managed for 15 people at once and took all the wins and put them in Hillary's account, which is how, in nine months, she made $100,000 profit.  And when she reached a hundred, which was the agreed amount of the bribe, she dropped out of the market.  There was that.  There was Whitewater, where they cut some corners and stuff.

But, fundamentally, back then, the Clintons wanted money in order to get power.  "Give me campaign contributions, so I can buy TV ads, so I can get elected to office."

Now, it's reversed.  They want public office and power in order to make more money.  The bribes go up.  They go up when you're running for president.  They go up when you're secretary of state.  They go up when you're running again for president, and they really hit the jackpot when you become president.

And Hillary will not agree to close that damn foundation down once she becomes president.  It's a bag.  Bill Clinton has become a bagman.  He goes around the world collecting money, and Hillary does favors for the people who contributed the money.

Now, some say, "Well, what favors?  What quid pro quo?"  Hey, the meeting is the favor.  The ability to talk about it is the favor.

There's a cute story.  You may remember it, Simon.  This guy gave John Kennedy $1 million when he was running, and Kennedy said, "Oh, that's great.  That's wonderful.  What can I do for you?"  And he said, "Oh, I don't know.  Just get the nomination and we'll talk."  Then he gets nominated and the guy gives him another million.  "Well, this is so generous of you.  What can I do for you?  Cabinet?  Ambassadorship?  What do you want?"  And he said, "Not now, Jack.  Just get elected and we'll talk after that."

Then Kennedy's elected, gives him another million for the inaugural expenses, and Kennedy is constantly asking him, "What do you want?"  And, then, in March, he calls Kennedy and says, "You know, I know you appreciate all the contributions."  And Kennedy said, "Of course, I do, but, you know, I've appointed all the ambassadors and the Cabinet is full.  What can I do for you?"  And he said, "Not really any of that, Jack.  Just can I have lunch with you two weeks from Tuesday at the Lion d'Or Restaurant in Washington?"  Kennedy said, "Yes, sure.  Of course.  But I'll have you at the White House mess and we'll have a private luncheon together."  And he said, "No, no.  I'd like to do it there."  "Okay."   

So he gets all of his clients, all of his business associates, all of his customers, his relatives, his friends to the restaurant, and half an hour later, Kennedy comes walking in and says hi to him, and he said, "Not now, Jack.  I'm busy." 

And that's how the worlds of money and influence work.  If you can go to a Third World Country and say, "Well, last week in my lunch with the secretary of states, she said --"you can have anything in the damn country.  You want oil rights?  You want the cable system?  You want the TV system?  You want the phone system?  You want the mineral-extraction stuff?  You want the contracts to build the roads?  What do you want?  You can have it all because of your relationship with the secretary of state."

And it is paying that kind of currency which is the core of the bribery that lies at the basis of the Clinton Foundation.  And I am just appalled by that corruption and that bribery.  Think about it for a minute, $238 million of income since they left the White House, about 30 of that from books.  Okay.  Fine.  They sold well and they're entitled to that.  Two-hundred million from speaking fees and consulting fees.  Out and out bribery.  You pay -- People like me speak for free, but you pay somebody $25,000 to give a speech, okay.  You pay a former president $100,000 to give a speech, fine, $150,000.  A million, that's a bribe.  And we're talking about wholesale bribery in every aspect of this.  And I just find that reprehensible. 

I'm not happy that Donald Trump didn't pay taxes.  I don't buy the argument that he didn't make a voluntary contribution.  When you have a real estate loss, you work at it.  You get depreciation.  You cut the angles.  You meet with your accountants and your lawyers.  And, yeah, he legally could do it, but you shouldn't do that and run for president, but it was no great harm.

The Clinton Foundation is literally the wholesale selling of favors and power and influence in the United States Government.  We have never had a corrupt president.  Richard Nixon was, but not personally.  He died poor.  Ulysses Grant had to finish his memoirs in an effort to get enough money for his wife to live on after his death.  Warren G. Harding committed suicide heavily in debt.  We've had presidents whose administrations were corrupt, but we've never had a president who was personally corrupt, and that is truly what Hillary Clinton is.

So I think we're going to do okay, but I do want to stress that this election is not between Trump and Hillary to be fought out between them.  It's all of us to be fought out with all of our associates and friends.

Let me see a show of hands here.  How many people are good friends or work colleagues, close to someone who's probably going to vote for Hillary?

Okay.  Now, I don't know if in another year that would have been true, and I'm sure that I could go to a Democratic event and ask the same question in reverse and have just as many hands in the air.  So this is a civil war.  This'll be fought out over the breakfast table, over the poker game, over the bowling club, in the book club, in the parents' association meeting.  And that's why Eileen and I wrote this book, to give you ammo for those fights, because the future of the United States of America is riding with you that night.

Thank you. 

QUESTIONER:  Could you comment on the precarious nature of our global financial system, how the Fed and the other central banks are in collusion and how the political process going on today interacts?

DICK MORRIS:  Oh, my God.  You want me to spoil everybody's digestion? 

Okay.  You asked for it.  There are two cycles at work, which are combining and will combine shortly for the perfect storm that will devastate our economy nationally and globally.

One is, of course, the normal business cycle, the ups and downs that have always characterized free-market capitalism.  And the way that works is that when you enter a recession, excess profits, companies that are not profitable, companies that are not -- employees that don't do good work, companies close.  They get laid off and it goes down.  And then the system recovers and it goes up again.  Prices drop to a point where people can afford to pay it, and then once they can afford to pay it, the prices go back up again and you come out of that trough. 

There was a recession in 1920 and '21 that is almost unknown, and yet it was like the third biggest recession in American history, and the reason it was unknown is the government did absolutely nothing to stop it.  Calvin Coolidge and Harding were in charge, and it was their philosophy not to do anything about it, and the result was a miraculous recovery . After eight months of nothing happening, the unemployment rate dropped from like 17 down to eight or nine or six and the economy completely recovered.

Laissez faire might not work as well now, but the problem is that the Federal Reserve Board has stopped that recovery from happening.  It's like somebody that gets sick and is running a fever.  The purpose of the fever is to kill the bacteria, and if you take aspirin and you lower the fever, you're not going to get rid of the bacteria and you're not going to become healthy.

And whenever the Fed saw signs of the economy going down, it flooded the economy with massive amounts of money.  The balance sheet of the Fed was $800 billion when Obama took office.  It is now $4.5 trillion, with an economy slightly larger, but not much.

And the result has been that the economy can't get well.  It can't leverage.  It can't get rid of all of the excess.  It can't prune it back.  It can't do the normal recovery that goes on in the economy, because of the flooding with printed money.

And, now, that's being taken up globally by every country in the world to a point where there is a massive flow of cash, without anything to back it up, saturating the markets and making them appear healthy, when, in fact, they are not.  They're desperately, horribly, horribly sick.  And that flood of money is going to continue and is going to worsen.

Now, the Fed stopped quantitative easing.  The reason they stopped quantitative easing was not a policy.  They couldn't do it anymore.  The Fed doesn't print money.  The Fed enables credit.  So the Fed goes to you and says, "I would like you to be able to borrow $1 million.  I'll give you the borrowing rights to $1 million.  I won't print $1 million.  I'll give you the borrowing rights, and if you accept that, and you borrow the million, you'll then lend it out to other people and it'll help the economy move.  And until you begin to write checks on that million, it's not created as money."

The problem is that nobody is willing to borrow now.  Everybody who's credit worthy is already maxed out.  Corporations are sitting on $2 trillion of cash.  Banks are sitting on $1 trillion of cash.  And by "cash," I mean they'll put it under the mattress rather than invest it in their own companies.  That's how insecure they feel about the economic situation.  The foreign cash that Trump talks about bringing back is another good example of that. Well, so, at some point, when quantitative easing has run its course throughout the world, you're going to have a huge, humongous stock market crash in the United States. 

But that's not the bad news.  (Laughter.)  There is something to overlay that with that's called the Kondratieff Cycle, which is the long-term cycle of the global economy, and it's based on the simple concept that debt piles up globally to a point where it's unsustainable and then comes crashing down.  And after it crashes, the generation that was there when it crashed have learned their lesson and don't borrow anymore.

But their children don't know it much.  They think about borrowing.  And the grandchildren completely forget about it and borrow like hell and do the same thing all over again.  And he posited that this was a 50-year cycle. 

And if you look at the economy from the crash of 1730 in Argentine Railway Shares; the crash of 1770 and '80 in the U.S., a land-speculation crash; the crash of the 1830s, a banking problem when Jackson closed the National Bank; the crash of the 1890s, which was basically an agrarian economy crash; the crash of the Great Depression -- And we've been due for one for quite a while now, for the last 10 or 20 years.

And the global level of indebtedness has gone completely berserk.  In 2000, the total debt -- mortgage debt, personal debt, corporate debt, national debt, every debt combined -- was $130 trillion.  Now, it is $230 trillion, and the GDP of the Planet Earth is only $75 trillion.  So the debt is now three times our theoretical ability to pay it.

When this hits the fan, it will be the perfect storm of these two things combining, and will, I think, create unbelievable disaster for a five- to 10-year period.  Sorry about that, but you asked. 

QUESTIONER:  I've been reading all these articles about rampant voter fraud.  And I wondered if you think that's going to have much of an impact.

DICK MORRIS:  Yeah, I think it will.  We, as pollsters [talk about] statistical margin of error. Now, we need the statistical margin of theft. 

The proof that it's happening was that North Carolina initiated a system with Kansas that was really the mover for [tightening the laws] it in which 26 states, the Red States, pooled their voter information data.  And North Carolina found that 75,000 people had voted in North Carolina in 2012 and had also voted in another state in 2012.  Same first name, same last name, same birth date, and in about 20 percent of the cases, where they them, the same Social Security Number.

So what happened was that Dick Morris moves from New York to Florida, and when you leave New York, you don't call up and say, "Cancel my voter registration."  You just don't vote.  So I vote in Florida.  And then they notice that Dick Morris isn't voting, and some guy comes along, maybe with an illegal immigrant, and said, "I'd like you to meet Dick Morris.  He'd like to vote."  And the inspector says, "Great.  And I can't ask you for a photo ID, so you can vote."  And 75,000 votes in North Carolina were cast with that, and probably twice as many, because 24 states refused to participate in the study.

So this is just a huge problem, and the goal of the photo ID movement is to stop voter fraud.  So we just have to win it by convincing enough margins so that that does not steal the election from us. 

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