From the Easy Chair

Piracy & Contrast

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 109-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CE151

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CE151, Piracy & Contrast, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 261, March the fourth, 1992.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott and myself will discuss, first of all, piracy and contracts. The subjects may seem unrelated, but we will get around to relating them.

Just a few general remarks before I have Douglas, who has some experience in this area, tell us much more about it.

Piracy in the modern era has been of two kinds, one that which has been a part of a government policy as, for example, when Queen Elizabeth gave letters to various sea captains, Sir Francis Drake and others, to wage an undeclared war on Spanish gold ships. She got a share of what was taken. This was legal. It was practiced by most governments. We outlawed it when we created the constitution. Then there was the free enterprise of piracy of scoundrels, criminals who one way or another secured a ship perhaps by stealing it in a fort and began to prey on the shipping of all countries. These were gangs of particularly desperate hoodlums. One scholar, professor B. R. Burg, B U R G, has attempted to rehabilitate them into a kind of fraternity in his book Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the 17th Century Caribbean. In other words, these men were, in a sense, outcasts of society because they were homosexuals and they became pirates and had a fellowship together, a kind of fraternity.

We are not talking about piracy of the past. Piracy today is having a major revival all over the world. It gets no publicity. And with the decline of the British and the British Empire’s loss, the navy no longer is the guardian of the seas and in almost every continent there are serious losses because of off shore piracy.

Douglas, would you like to say more on the subject from your experience?

[ Murray ] Well, quite a few years ago, in 1978, I was invited to go along as a radio operator on a scientific expedition that was organized from Europe by French and Swiss to go to Clipperdon Island. Now Clipperdon Island was named for a free booter or pirate of those days and it came to be rather prophetic because in the course of traveling down there, we left San Diego. It is about a five or six day run down to Clipperdon Island. We were on the radio continuously announcing our position and our estimated time of arrival at Clipperdon on the amateur radio frequencies. And within a few hours after we got there another boat pulled up on this deserted uninhabited, totally uninhabited island. There were no other boats anywhere around the island. It is quite small. And I was down below working on some equipment when I got a call from the captain of our boat to come up armed and he knew I had brought a fire arm with me. I got up on deck and there was a rubber boat full of men who looked like they had just been picked off the back lot at some movie production studio. One guy had a patch over his eye. There were others that had parts of military, American military uniforms. They were ... they were armed with automatic weapons. They were carrying knives and the captain had everybody come up on the starboard side of the boat that we were on and display the weapons. And they came over and asked who we were, what we were doing on the island and how long we planned to be around and so forth. And the captain gave evasive answers and eventually after seeing the weapons, we had... the first mate had an automatic machine gun and various other weapons, why, they decided to ... to take off. They went back to their sail boat and we watched them sail away.

In the mean time the skipper told me that these were one of many bands of pirates—this is the year 1978 now—that were roaming up and down the coast of central and South America and also in the South Seas, looking for people on small yachts, primarily pleasure boats, luxury yachts who were taking their lifetime living out their lifetime dream of taking a cruise to the South Seas on a small boat. And what they were doing was they were killing and stealing boats to order. Some of these people were know to be persona non gratia in some countries, but in others they were welcomed by the local officials, both police officials as well as other government officials because they would actually put in an order for a particular pleasure craft and these fellows would go out and they would find one by numerous methods.

One of the favorite methods was they would have one of their number would go up to the yacht harbor, say, in San Diego or Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and just hang around the docks and ask questions until they found someone who was getting ready to take off on one of these cruises with a brand new, fully outfitted boat, fully provisioned, first class boat. And they would talk about all of the possible things that could go wrong and kind of scare the owners of the boat into taking them on as a ... an extra hired hand to help them through these difficult situations.

And what would happen is that these ... they would have a prearranged destination. This fellow would kill the people on the boat, say, a man and a wife team, throw them over the side to the sharks and then take the boat to the pre arranged destination. And they would listen to the radio during this period of time. And if it was announced on the various frequencies that this boat was missing then they would strip all of the electronics and as much as the valuable stuff off the boat as possible and then scuttle the boat and away they go. If there was no information put out about the boat was missing, then they would go ahead and deliver the boat to one of these government officials and that is how they made their money. And this is an ongoing thing.

Now these fellows look like they were... some of them were ... had just come back from Vietnam. I mean they were... they looked like combat types. And some of them appeared to be like they had been through real alley cats. They had scars and so forth. Some of them were... had been pretty badly cut up.

[ Scott ] How many were there?

[ Murray ] Eight.

[ Scott ] How many of you?

[ Murray ] Eighteen. And so it was not good odds for them to take us on. So it is alive and well up and down the coast of Central and South America and all of he skippers that do chartering have to be aware of this. And the skippers of the tuna boats and all these other fishing boats that are worth millions some of these boats that go down and catch tuna off the coast of South America are worth millions of dollars and they go heavily armed.

[ Scott ] Does our navy have any role to play here?

[ Murray ] They ... once you get below the boundary between the United States and Mexico, the coast guard will not go any further. And the navy doesn't bother to go along the coastal waters. During our cruise down there we didn’t see any American shipping at all. And we were in the coastal shipping lanes.

[ Scott ] Or planes?

[ Murray ] No planes, no American planes.

[ Scott ] Well, I thought they were on the {?} or drug smugglers.

[ Murray ] Well, I haven’t cranked up the 1978. Now it is... there... there may be more interdiction efforts on the part of American military, but that didn't start until about five or six year ago.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, according to Captain Roger Villare, an English sea captain in Piracy Today: Robbery and Violence at Sea since 1980, written 1984, in four years he listed all over the world 400 cases of piracy and said he made no attempt to go after the very numerous small crafts that had been pirated and were, as he said, routinely, every one is killed and the women slaughtered. He gave accounts of how... where women are captured. One gang will pass a woman to the other until... unless they are rescued, they can have sustained rape for as much as 17 hours according to the figures he has in some cases.

Only one country has attempted to deal with it and they don’t have anything of a navy, Singapore. And theirs is a difficult area because the straits have so many hiding places where they can come out quickly. But piracy is big business. No navy today is concerned. Captain Villare says the pirates are actually moving in many areas in the world right into harbors and the harbor police will not respond to a radio call from a ship to come to their aid because they are afraid of these pirates who very often working in harbors will have boats like the harbor police and fake uniforms. And the come and board a ship and before people know it, they have taken over the ship.

So it is a very critical factor in that information about it is suppressed and apart from Singapore, no one is tackling this issue. And Singapore, without a real navy is having to do it with small boats.

[ Murray ] Well, the only ... I suppose positive aspect of the drug trade, it has taken the pressure off of the depredations on small boat owners because there is much more money to be made in smuggling drugs than there is going after small yachts. So from that standpoint, it may have taken some of the pressure off, particularly in the coastal waters.

[ Rushdoony ] It is very heavy in Africa, very severe and in the Far East and the Caribbean, off the coast of California and Mexico. And one of the things they are going for now are cargo ships, to take the ship and the cargo. And they are totally brazen and open about it. And when you consider the value of the cargo on a single freighter, this is big money, especially what makes it easy is that in many, many countries the freighters are forbidden to carry weapons.

[ Scott ] Well, most of the freighters used to carry weapons as a matter of course. They were kept locked up, but they were available. Trying to seize that is infested with pirates...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] For several thousand years and that has always been a dangerous area. The Florida Keys are a dangerous area without pirates. There was a case, I remember, when I was a boy that a Chilean war ship was mutinied and floated around the Caribbean committing depredations for a period and around 1930, I think, in the several navies had to go out and get it. The reason that the English navy curtailed piracy was, of course, because the English possessions were so far flung that they had to keep the trade routes between these territories peaceful and England from 1815 to 1914 maintained the freedom of the seas and the ability of other countries to navigate. Our clipper ships would never have gotten to China in the first place if they hadn't had the protection of the English navy.

But the empire is gone and the navy is greatly diminished. We told the French and the Portuguese and the Spanish and the Dutch and the Belgians that they didn’t need a Navy anymore, because they were going to protect them after World War II. We wiped them off the face of the globe, so to speak, as first rate powers and turned them into second and third rate trading countries. We were going not protect everybody, Japan, all possessions, every country in the world. We are going to protect the whole world. And, in fact, we made treaties with almost every country to that effect.

On the other hand, we turned a 3500 ship navy into less than 600. We cut back and cut back the largest navy in the world so far as I know today is still the old Soviet navy. I don’t now what has happened to it or how they are going to parcel it out. But we never did succeed in making the seas peaceful of other countries because we were too involved in reducing our navy.

[ Rushdoony ] Russia has the navy.

[ Scott ] Russia.

[ Rushdoony ] They sailed them out before the Ukrainians could get control of them.

[ Scott ] Well, they...

[ Rushdoony ] They tied them up into the Baltic region.

[ Scott ] It is not only the largest navy, but it is the largest merchant marine in the world. We have no merchant marine. We had the least cargo vessels and transports from both Europe and the Soviets at that time in order to get our men in the gulf. And I am sure that created a great scare in all of them. At that point the features of the gulf action which Mr. Bush has never made a speech about.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things, quoting from Captain Villare, “Despite taking various precautions many have been surprised at the extreme agility of the young, barefoot pirates. One commercial company offers detachable barbed wire which can be installed around the gunwale or just over the poop area when on passage and likely be attacked from that. It is a simple, yet clearly effective defense.”

The China Seas and the Philippines are once again a vast network of piracy.

[ Scott ] And it boomed right after World War II. I remember Sherman {?} the master that I knew who got a ship to sail in the China area. I remember we were all very envious because he was going to be paid 1000 dollars in gold every month. And somebody gave him as a joke a sword to protect himself against the pirates.

[ Murray ] Well, any small boat that goes out today and ... better have good radio equipment. In fact, it is almost mandatory now that they become amateur radio operators, they check into a net that meets every so many hours and if they don’t check in, somebody is looking for them. And in many cases now they travel in a squadron, several of them will go together.

[ Scott ] Yachts.

[ Murray ] Yes, private yachts for their initial protection.

[ Scott ] Well, these are often taken over by amateur seamen. I remember the San Diego Yacht Club used to have one fairly weak had 40,000 boats, quite a good number of boats for one yacht club to have. And some of them used to rot right at the pier because they were only used for playing poker on weekends and having a girl or something. But, in fact, I met one young man who made a living pulling them up.

But there were several cases of some very well placed upper middle class people who disappeared on their yachts. And the yachts reappeared, disguised and so forth, although the international registry, you know, is pretty good. But, nevertheless, there is an awful lot of boats In the world and unless there is the insurance company or some heir makes a very determined effort, these things are easily disposed of.

[ Murray ] Well, there was a celebrated case here a few years ago out on... I think it was Johnston Island, the southern tip of the Hawaiian chain where there was a... a murder of some people which involved piracy. And it was going on all over.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you see, we are talking constantly about a one world order and yet the United Nations, the United States and all the countries of the world have lost all interest in protecting their own freighters, their own citizenry when they are on the high seas or even in their harbors so that the more they dream of a one world order, the more everything is crumbling around us.

[ Scott ] Well, that is because there is a... a change in the governmental attitude toward individuals. Individuals become ciphers or become numbers and statistics and not individuals. And, statistically speaking, the number of people involved are a very, very small minority. Who really cares about the rich? We are listening now to presidential campaign rhetoric about the fact that the rich should solve all our economic problems, by turning over their money. You know, let’s... let’s make it fair and take the money away from the rich guy. So in a government where we are viewed as statistics and not as people, they are not going to make extra effort to protect you.

[ Rushdoony ] No. No, the protection is nil on the ... Robert Villare calls attention throughout his little book which is simply a chronicle and a very sad chronicle of unconcern about the people who are being killed, raped, robbed and ...

[ Scott ] How may votes do they have?

[ Murray ] That is the bottom line.

[ Scott ] What group do they represent?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They are either shipping companies or yachtsmen.

[ Murray ] Well I figure that the shipping companies will be reimbursed by insurance and a small number of individuals who are done away with don’t matter in the great scheme of things.

[ Scott ] The great scheme of things is a good phrase.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, these contemporary pirates are a totally murderous lot.

[ Scott ] They always were.

[ Rushdoony ] They always were, but at one time any person of consequence was held for ransom.

[ Scott ] Well, Julius Caesar in a very famous instance who finally, of course, after he was ransomed went back and had every one of them crucified.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] I have often thought, you know, when these waves of concern about MIAs in Vietnam, I have often think back to looking at these fellows in that rubber boat and I will bet you that at least two or three of them are MIAs and they don’t want to ever be found. They don’t want to go back to whatever it was they left when they left the United States. And there is probably hundreds of groups just like them.

[ Scott ] Well, that is a historic thing, too. Former soldiers or veterans of the wars who are totally unhinged from domestic and peaceful life or they have been figures just as old as the pirates. Well, they are.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the results are becoming increasingly bad for trade figures. In other words, Southeast Asia has been good market. But how good a market can it remain when freighters are regularly pirated?

[ Scott ] Regularly pirated sounds a little extreme to me.

[ Rushdoony ] Four hundred in four years?

[ Scott ] Freighters?

[ Rushdoony ] All kinds of ships, but primarily larger boats is what he is concerned with.

[ Scott ] Freighter... a freighter... a freighter is pretty good sized ship. When I sailed oh, the freighter carried 38 crew and cargo of many millions. Now, of course, the figures are tripled or quadrupled, whatever. I don’t know where you could hide a freighter.

[ Rushdoony ] No. What they do with the freighters is they pull alongside, especially in ports in what appears to be a police boat and board. And then suddenly weapons are produced...

[multiple voices]

[ Rushdoony ] Other ships pull up and swarm over them. They kill the captain and others. They unload the ship as much of the cargo and they seem to know what is on board and what they want. And they are gone in an hour or two and maybe about four or five hours later the harbor police will show up to make a formal report which is nothing.

[ Scott ] Well... I think I would put in a call to the maritime union and find out how many freighters have been so treated, because 400 sounds too {?} far too many.

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] ...men on a vessel and then take half the cargo. I can’t see how even our press could not find out about it.

[ Rushdoony ] They don’t kill them all. One or two, enough to frighten the rest. And then they go after the cargo and Captain Roger Villare, concerned about this, has documented it and he says he has only scratched the surface.

[ Scott ] Where is it? Where are these things? Where do they occur on the freighters? Do you remember? Is it in African ports?

[ Rushdoony ] It will be in Asiatic and African ports. In American waters it will be yachts primarily.

[ Murray ] The smart crew members are going to go over the side. They are not getting paid to go up against people with automatic weapons.

[ Scott ] Tell me about it. Tell me. I am very interested.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is all an indication of the fact that our present world order is collapsing, that there is less and less concern about lawlessness and more and more concern about political issues, the power of the state. And I think this is a very, very grim fact, because we are in the midst of an election and we are hearing all kinds of high sounding promises and yet these are the people, whether they are in this country or elsewhere, who are unconcerned what happens to the people. Their basic concern is power.

I would like to read some sentences from Captain Roger Vallare’s book Piracy Today. I quote. “The concept of piracy as an international crime is an ancient one. As long ago as 1668 Sir Leonine Jenkins declared that all pirates and sea rovers are outlawed by the law of all nations. That is, out of the protection of prices and of laws whatsoever. For centuries the pirate has been regarded as a common enemy. Precise legal definitions of piracy today are enshrined in the Geneva Convention on the high seas of 1958 which declares it to be any illegal acts of violence, detention or any act of depredation committed for private ends by the crew or passengers of a private ship or private aircraft and directed A) on the high seas against another ship or aircraft or against persons or property on board such ships or aircraft, B) against the ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any state. One essential feature of this definition is that piracy is something committed for private ends. Terrorism, in support of political objections is not, therefore, piracy, nor can piracy be committed by a war ship or a government ship or aircraft even if the act is unauthorized. The draft convention prepared by the third United Nations conference on the law of the sea in 1982 also states in article 101 that on the high seas or in any other place outside the jurisdiction of any state, every state may seize a pirate ship or aircraft or a ship taken by piracy and under the control of pirates and arrest the persons and seize the property on board. The courts of the state which carried out the seizure may decide upon the penalties to be imposed. The punishment of pirates is, therefore, left to the discretion of individual states. Any nation may arrest a pirate and try him according to his own laws.”

And what he goes on to say is that because it is left to the discretion of every nation, each nation can define what it considers to be its proper jurisdiction. There is no definition given of high seas so that all of them can shirk the responsibility and say that, of course, they are against piracy, but they do not feel that that was within their proper jurisdiction.

[ Scott ] And, of course, that goes against the old tradition that every vessel is a piece of a nation.

[ Murray ] Of course.

[ Scott ] And if you have a vessel that is flying an American flag that becomes victimized or attacked by pirates, it would b the duty of the American navy to do something about it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] A recent classic case would be the Achilles Lauro, the ship that was seized in the Mediterranean. They shot the fellow in the wheel chair and threw him over the side and then the Italian government let the guys go...

[ Scott ] ...because it wasn’t in Italian waters. Or it was an Italian ship, though, wasn’t it?

[ Murray ] I believe so.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Yea. In times...

[ Scott ] Well, that was a... that was a shirking of their duty.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, this is his point precisely and this is what leads to the second half of our subject, contracts.

[ Scott ] Contracts.

[ Rushdoony ] ... because here is a contract made by all the nations of the world and kept by none of them except to a certain degree Singapore. And we...

[ Scott ] Singapore...

[ Rushdoony ] We have...

[ Scott ] Singapore’s trade is most directly affected.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We have a world situation today, whether it is a ship at sea or a contract affecting oil. No country feels that the contract is valid. They don’t want to be bothered by it. You wrote for the journal a few years ago on OPEC and the significance of the destruction of the idea of the sanctity of contracts. I think you ought to go into it, Otto.

[ Scott ] Well, I will go to the period prior to that. The... it was the United States government in the OPEC situation, the international oil situation, which decided as a matter of state policy that the oil producing countries, or the countries in which oil is produced could change contracts with American firms at will unilaterally. So, of course, that began the escalation of oil prices which resulted in the embargo and all kinds of things. But even before that, there were two events that stand out in my mind. The first was the decision of the United States Supreme Court over the gold clause in American contracts. You remember and I do, too, well, I used to get gold coins for my birthday and so forth and so on.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It was a... it was a normal gift. I never saw them again, but they were always shown to me. Contracts in the United States used to be drawn up to be payable in gold.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And when Mr. Roosevelt made the possession of individuals in gold illegal, this affected all the contracts. And one party, one businessman took his contract all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court ruled that the gold clause in the contract was no longer a matter of issue because of the legal tender act which had been enacted somewhere between 1869 and 1871 giving the American government the power to, in effect, issue paper money.

Now that was the first big denial of the right of a contract that I can think of. And it is done by the Supreme Court. The next one came as the result of the Nye hearings. Do you remember those hearings about war time...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] ...profiteering in World War I?

[ Rushdoony ] Senator Nye.

[ Scott ] Senator Nye. Early in the New Deal and he had J. P. Morgan, Junior and all kinds of other people in front of him and he was a... was very indignant about the fact that they presumably made too much money in World War I. Well, we went into World War II with the governmental idea that you could limit war time profits to a certain amount. I think it was 10 percent over cost. Then after the war was over, after everyone had really worked. I mean some men worked themselves to death during the war. There was as much heroism in the home front as there was in other places. After the war, a bunch of young accountants poured into all these companies to renegotiate the contracts. And what they did is that they pulled out all the records and their argument was that they may have made their cost deliberately higher in order to make the 10 percent higher. So they examined all the books and they examined all the costs and they cut back and told these businessmen, business companies to give back to the companies so much to the United States government so much money.

Now this was a violation of every contract that has ever been drawn and there was a violation of the contract between the citizens of the United States and the government of the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] And some of those companies went under.

[ Scott ] Some of them went under because they no longer had the money.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They paid the money. You had expenses to switch into peace time production. You had this. Also, don’t forget, Mr. Roosevelt had passed a law limiting the amount of... percentage of money that a company could keep to plow back. They limited dividends and they limited {?} kept. So...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So they were caught in a vice. Now this was the greatest welching, I hate to use the word and I hope there is nobody listening who is of Welsh descent, or I will take it back and... and try to think of another term. It was an awful double cross. And it paved the way for the violation of international contracts by the United States government.

Now England, with all of its faults and certainly I know they were deep and many, nevertheless, had two firm positions. One a contract was sacred because the entire capitalist system was based on the right of individuals to draw up a contract mutually agreeable that could then have the force of law. And a contract between an English company and a sovereign power, the Pasha of Tangiers, let us say, if the... if the pasha changed that, they would send in a gun boat and he would regret the day. But we said he has the right to do it if he wants to. So we set in motion the destruction of contracts, the sanctity of contracts throughout the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And it has reached down into the smallest community now because every court feels it has the right to rewrite a contract.

[ Scott ] To set it aside.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Like marriage contracts.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, it is even worse. With... if I have made... I have made deals with corporations to write their history and we agree on terms and then the matter is turned over to the lawyers. The lawyers come up with a 1700 pages from a dictionary, a legal dictionary which neither me or anyone else in the company can read outside of the legal department. So I am like any other small businessman. I am in the position of trying to fulfill the terms of a contract I don’t understand.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Well, have you ever read an environmental impact statement?

[ Scott ] No, I haven’t.

[ Murray ] You want a real joy ride. I have tried to read them and they are just incomprehensible except to the people who draw them up.

[ Scott ] So the lawyers.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] ... are the only ones who understand what is in a contract.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] They can make anything out of it they want to. It is a big lump of clay.

[ Scott ] But then we have moved beyond contracts. Contract law is no longer the governing law in our judicial system. We have moved into torts. Now a tort just a few years ago never appeared. It is a violation of a constitutional right by one individual over another. Now that gets you into an area which is all smoke. And there is no limit to the amount of damages that can be claimed under a tort. So the contract is set aside and now we have torts.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, what has happened, for example, in the Christian school movement is that no school with any common sense will give a teacher a contract. He will work on a month by month basis.

[ Scott ] No contract.

[ Rushdoony ] No contract, because anything written no matter how you word it, if it goes to court labor—meaning the Christian school teacher—will prevail against capital, the Christian school. So that anything written is dangerous because you are going to be a loser.

[ Scott ] Well, the argument seems to be—correct me if I am wrong—that the individual is not capable of understanding a contract and has to be protected by the court...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...against that terms of the contract that they voluntarily signed.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Even when it is very simple English that ... well, one school a few years back had every teacher sign a statement that they agreed that if they became pregnant and had a child it was against their policy to have a working mother. The small child should be cared for at home and they felt very strongly, religiously about that. This woman signed such a statement and then sued.

[ Scott ] After she had a child.

[ Rushdoony ] After she had a child and...

[ Scott ] ... and was dismissed.

[ Rushdoony ] And she was not rehired so she went to court about it and the court felt it had a perfect right to adjudicate the matter.

[ Scott ] They set aside the rules of the school.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Because the courts feel that to intervene in almost any new area is an opportunity to exercise state sovereignty.

[ Scott ] Well this is an extension of the contempt for the individual.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That only the system can decide these issues, that they are too important for the individual to decide.

[ Rushdoony ] Contracts, from being something religiously regarded, have now become a form of piracy.

[ Scott ] Well, especially religiously, because the court does not recognize...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...religious rules.

[ Murray ] You want to hear something bizarre? I was looking up the meaning of contract in Webster’s second edition. The ... the root meaning that was ... that Blackstone gave in the law was an agreement upon sufficient consideration to do or not to do a particular thing. And everybody drew their ... their meaning from that. But in Webster’s ninth new collegiate, one of the things included is an order or arrangement for a hired assassin to kill someone.

[ Scott ] That is an example.

[ Murray ] That is an example. Now we used to call that conspiracy to commit a crime.

[ Scott ] Well, it is.

[ Murray ] They are now calling that a contract.

[ Scott ] Well, legally it is a... it is a conspiracy to commit a crime. A contract has to be... in a contract it used to be you could not make a contract to enter into a slave relationship with somebody else, peonage, in other words, even if the individual signed such a contract it was in violation of the Constitution, because it was in violation of his constitutional rights. So there were limits to the... to the ... to the whole idea of a contract. There had to be some benefit to both parties otherwise people could be forced into unjust contracts. But the... you could... you could... if I wanted to sell you my house for a dollar, that would be a valid contract.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I don’t see any possibility of a return to the validity of contracts until we have a return to a biblical perspective, because, as you said earlier, a contract was once regarded as a sacred obligation. That is gone now. It used to be that a man’s word was his bond. That was a common saying when we were boys.

[ Scott ] Well, that is true and it still is in Wall Street.

[ Rushdoony ] It was.

[ Scott ] No, it still is.

[ Rushdoony ] In the crash of 87 Wall Street lost millions to investors who did not keep their word.

[ Scott ] Well, that is never to say that men didn’t break their word in Wall Street.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] What I am saying is that any man who breaks his word in Wall Street will never do business in Wall Street again.

[ Rushdoony ] True. But this was unprecedented.

[ Scott ] Well, they did... {?}

[ Rushdoony ] {?}

[ Scott ] ... people who broke there word were unprecedented.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But Wall Street can only function...

[ Rushdoony ] Of course.’

[ Scott ] To earn the ... during the oil crisis my friends in the oil industry deal with literally hundreds of millions of dollars in oil contracts every month over the phone and this is a very fluid situation and so you may make an agreement to buy a million dollars worth of crude at two o'clock in the afternoon at 10 dollars a barrel and 10 minutes later the price may go up or down.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It makes no difference. You are still committed to 10 dollars.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] And there is no record of the 10 dollars except your word and the word of the man that sold it to you. This gave the government of the United States a great deal of trouble, because under Carter they passed a number of regulations governing trades. Now they have called all the oil companies in and now we are talking about a span of eight or nine years or even longer of .... I believe this was, let’s say, 72 or 73. And this is 92. So we are talking about nine or 10 years.

They are still trying to find a paper trail of all the transactions that were done during that period. And there is no paper trail because it was done over the phone. And the bureaucrats in Washington cannot adjust to the idea...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... that this amount of money can be handled over the phone on a man’s word.

[ Murray ] Do you think there is something surreptitious in the...

[ Scott ] They feel that they are on the trail of a giant conspiracy to cheat the government out of taxes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it used to be that most business was conducted on a man’s word. And you took a loss, but you kept your word.

[ Scott ] You had to.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] If you were going to do business with these people again,...

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] Or with anyone else in that area.

[ Rushdoony ] A recent example of that in the 70s was when silver hit 50 dollars and because the Hunt brothers were profiting heavily on silver the federal government through Comex got into the market to kill it. And there was a crash.

Well, at that last moment people had been taking their beautiful silver antiques, every kind of silver in all its forms and selling them to be melted down. And the dealers were buying it in vast quantities. And they kept their word when the price...

[ Scott ] Even though the price went down.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Even through it collapsed.

[ Rushdoony ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] They had to.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It was a disaster for them financially, but they kept their word. Now that is the kind of thing that has prevailed. It was a verbal contract. It was honored, but what we are seeing presently—and it begins in the school—there is no sense of honor there. Honor is a word that this alien to the public school culture and its teaching.

So what is developing is the gang mentality in the schools to an appalling degree and a contempt for this kind of thing, integrity, honor, contract.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... it is still... the commodity market is another area where huge trades are made on gesture like an auction. The government in its latest regulations is going to enter the commodity market with regulations. And the commodity brokers say that this is going not destroy the commodity market. It is going to destroy the commodity exchange, because the exchange can’t function on a paper basis. It is too fluid.

The collapse of contract law or the collapse of contracts between individuals rally come... came from the top. It came from the top, the top layers. And if the professors in the universities had managed to transmit this information down to the... to the schools, well, then this condition of the schools is a result of that. But it began with our congress and our courts.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And our president and our state department. It began with our government which is so anxious to control the economy that it doesn't want the people to make their own arrangements.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, you recall early in the 80s they moved into Chicago and seized the records of one commodity trader after another, vast tonnage of paper.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] And they have bee working at it all this time and they have never come up with one case where they can go to court and say, “This man was dishonest.”

[ Scott ] Well, they have ... they are doing some very strange things. On the savings and loan crisis when it occurred there are a number of savings and loans institutions that were very solid. They also had a number of junk bonds which is simply bonds that have a higher yield than the average and are a little more speculative than the average. But there is... there is no law against buying speculative bonds.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] If you decide that there is a good chance that it will pay out, why you go right ahead and get it. They came in with new regulations during the crisis and they forced very solid savings and loans institutions to dump all their junk bonds on the market at once which collapsed the value of the junk bonds.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And which created an enormous crisis out of what was a relatively minor crisis. Then they turned around to punish the people who were involved in the junk bond business. And I think it is an interesting contrast between the treatment of Keating, for instance, who is now totally bankrupt, who has to ask for a public defender to defend him against various lawsuits and the treating of Ivan Boesky...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the treatment of Milliken, both of whom are emerging enormously rich where this other fellow is absolutely stripped to the bone and is going to go to prison apparently for life. So you not only have the expansion of governmental controls, but you have the expansion of political favoritism in the application of regulations.

[ Rushdoony ] And Keating’s problem was that he was pro life...

[ Scott ] And anti faggot.

[ Rushdoony ] Anti... yes, anti homosexual so they sent down, what was it, 13 bank examiners and 12 of whom were faggots.

[ Scott ] That is what one of his attorneys told me. And I believe him.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Well, I... in my mind the ultimate breaking of a contract was read my lips.

[ Scott ] It was the most spectacular...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... instance. I think I have never seen a man commit an act of dishonor on such a wide stage before in all my life. I ... I wonder that he has the nerve to run, because what promise can he make that will carry any credibility with anyone.

[ Rushdoony ] And that, as one commentator has observed, is the critical issue in this campaign that no one will face up to.

[ Murray ] He weekly...

[ Rushdoony ] Credibility.

[ Scott ] He... we have him as the first one to raise it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] None of the... none of... none of the rest were going to raise it, not even the Democrats, because they were complicit in the ...

[ Rushdoony ] Exactly.

[ Scott ] In the false...

[ Rushdoony ] And they ...

[ Scott ] ...that was made.

[ Rushdoony ] ... all have questionable records.

[ Murray ] He... he weekly defends himself on the basis of it being a ... a political compromise, but that is not the way people see it.

[ Scott ] No. He says, “They made me do it.”

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] But they not... they won’t do it again.

[ Murray ] Right. If you believe that, we have got some swamp land in Florida.

[ Scott ] The...

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have just a couple of minutes left. Is there anything you would like to say by way of conclusion?

[ Murray ] Well, for... I think there is a great deal of frustration in people generally that contracts are not kept nowadays. I think the... the frustration is with the government. It is with government agencies. The Constitution, which is supposed to be a contract between our government and the people is now routinely broken and run roughshod over. Our politicians lie to us and break verbal contracts. I think people in general are pretty disgusted with it.

[ Scott ] Well, after all, it is now accepted that unions can break their contracts and go out on wild cat strikes any time they want to and hold up the milk of babies.

[ Rushdoony ] Well thank you all for listening. And God bless you. Remember that we are not going to overcome these problems without a return to the faith. The problem is a lot ... lack of character and we are in a world where the pirates are not only on the high seas, but they are all around us and the solution has to be a return to a truly biblical, to a truly Christian faith.

Thank you all and God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.