President Trump is warning US allies to cease purchasing Iranian oil by November at the latest. At the same time he's demanding OPEC (of which Iran is a member) start pumping harder to keep gas prices in the US stable. Make sense? It's all about "regime change."
President Trump is warning US allies to cease purchasing Iranian oil by November at the latest. At the same time he's demanding OPEC (of which Iran is a member) start pumping harder to keep gas prices in the US stable. Make sense? It's all about "regime change."
President Trump is warning US allies to cease purchasing Iranian oil by November at the latest. At the same time he's demanding OPEC (of which Iran is a member) start pumping harder to keep gas prices in the US stable. Make sense? It's all about "regime change."
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I'm doing well, and thought we'd talk about oil in Iran.
Our president's been involved in the oil market.
I didn't know he was an oil expert, but from what I read, what's been happening here these last few days, it looks like he's trying to fix the price of oil.
He wants low gasoline prices, and it's said that all presidents want low gasoline prices in the summer, because if the prices go up, the president gets blamed, which is a fallacy as well, unless the president does something and the Congress does something to push the price of oil up.
Well, because of this, this is related in some ways to Trump's orders that his desire of all our allies and people outside of Iran, don't buy any more oil from Iran.
We've got to punish them, which is rather bizarre because this is related to the nuclear-Iranian deal.
You know, we got out of it.
And the Europeans don't like this.
But now we have to put on our sanctions, and this is part of this effort to have sanctions.
So he is saying nobody should buy it.
And I'm going to give you to November 2nd, someday in November, to do it.
But I don't know what he's going to do about it because the people who buy it are Russia and China.
And they're even trying to do this without the use of the dollar as the currency.
So it is a mess.
In one sense, he's doing something that would push the price of oil up.
Matter of fact, when he made this announcement, oil went up just about $3.
It is back up to $73 right now, pushing prices up.
But then he turns around and he goes to OPEC.
He says, I want you to lower the price of oil.
Pump, pump, pump, and make up for this distortion.
And he goes to OPEC, but Iran is a member of OPEC.
So it is a rather bizarre thing.
And I don't think he's going to have control of it.
He's going to move markets up and down, and there'll be emotions, and there'll be a reflex action from it.
But I just think it's more mischief.
We get involved in trying to punish a country we don't like.
And this whole idea that we had an agreement, that we would start working with Iran, remove some of the sanctions, and they had lived up to their agreement.
Trump gets in and he breaks the agreement.
He gets out.
And yet the Europeans are annoyed because we get out.
So why don't you solve that problem for us?
Do you think Trump's going to be successful in getting everything he wants, punish Iran at the same time?
The rest of OPEC is going to increase production in order to make the gasoline prices low in this country so Trump looks good.
Yeah, I think he wants the best of both worlds, and I don't know that he can get them.
But I think this is really the next chapter in his regime change plan for Iran.
Everyone around him is in Iran hawk, including himself.
Everyone around him wants regime change in Iran.
John Bolton, his national security advisor, actually was on the payroll of this Iranian terrorist group, MEK, that wants to overthrow Iran.
So this is what they want to do.
And I think what they want to do is they want to collapse the economy in Iran in the hopes that it will finally get the overthrow that they wanted and overthrow the government.
And I think this is part of it.
But as you point out, you know, Iran has lived up to its part of the deal.
In good faith, negotiated this deal.
The Europeans said, hey, we're going to try to keep the deal as much as we can.
We're going to try to keep it.
But that U.S. pressure on Europe, Europe's going to look at how much they trade with the U.S. versus how much to trade with Iran.
And it's going to be hard for them, I think, to conclude that they should stick with Iran.
Well, it is a mess now.
And whether or not this works, I just rather doubt it.
In a way, the theory that we've worked on is that we'll stir up trouble, and we'll bomb countries or try to put on sanctions, and we'll get them so upset they'll say, we've got to get rid of our government, you know, because they're the cause.
But sometimes that goes opposite.
They get upset, but it unifies the country against us.
In this case, you know, we're upsetting the people, and they're annoyed.
They're probably somewhat annoyed at us.
There's some that are annoyed with the Ayakoto.
But now there's a hint that people are maybe annoyed with their government.
But what we don't know is, is this real, spontaneously structured?
Is it people just rousing up and say, oh, yeah, we've had enough.
We don't trust our government, the Ayatollah, so we better change our loyalties to Trump.
So even though there are demonstrations, they're not going to do much to weaken that government.
I keep thinking these kind of things strengthen the government because they get together when they know an outsider is trying to come in.
Yeah, it could be, but these things can spiral out of control, too.
And I think we have to, the default assumption has to be, I think, that the CIA is involved.
You know, there was a Wall Street Journal article June 7th, 2017, just a year ago, announcing the creation of this new Iran Mission Center where it's going to look for new ways to, quote, turn up the heat on Iran, including covert actions to overthrow the government.
Remember, we talked about this before.
It's headed up by this guy, Michael D'Andre, who's known as Ayatollah Mike, because he's a superhawk on Iran.
He's a CIA guy.
Strangely enough, he's a convert to Islam, but super rapidly anti-Iran.
He's heading this thing up.
If you look at the timeline, they've had about a year to get things ramped up.
It does make you wonder about the protests that have had about two days in Iran, in Tehran, the protests that have ramped up there.
Yeah, and I just don't believe that this all of a sudden is going to change things for the better.
I think it's going to be made worse by our interference and not living up to what was assumed to be an agreement.
And I think that people who have invested long-term on oil probably are going to do okay because the unintended consequences of what happens there, you don't know exactly what will happen.
If there's a breakdown of the civil government there in Iran, that could have a lot of ramifications.
And then it also, you know, invites people to look more carefully at what our CIA is doing, what Saudi Arabia is up to these days.
But it's been pretty well orchestrated against Iran.
It's, to me, like an obsession, this whole thing that if there's a problem in Yemen, it's Iran's fault.
And also the problems in Syria, well, we can handle it if we just can keep the Iranians out of Syria.
Then things will move along much better.
Death to Dollars00:02:55
But it's a thing that I think potentially is very dangerous.
But it is to me rather ironic that the prices of oil are going up.
At the same time, we're demanding that the oil prices go down.
And the uncertainty over what might happen come November is really taking a, the economy is taking a hit.
The currency dropped, it was 42,000 real to the dollar, I think, just recently, and now it's to 90,000.
So that's hitting a lot of people.
They're starting to panic.
They want to get rid of their real.
They want to get dollars instead.
So it's kind of this economic warfare that the U.S. is fighting against Iran.
I think it is paying off and it is getting people nervous and agitated.
You know, and there is a desire on their part, and there's been other governments in a desire not to use the dollar, and they've been punished.
And Iran has the sympathies for this, and they even try to do it.
But it shows you how powerful the dollar is.
The dollar isn't going to be dethroned overnight.
It'll be dethroned, and it keeps getting weaker as far as purchasing power go, and everybody depends on more of that monetary inflation by the Fed.
But they've recently traded some oil for their local currencies, and they would like to do that.
But obviously, that doesn't help their currency at all.
Matter of fact, their currency is in bad shape.
I think the same way with China, as powerful as they are, they have a lot of distortions there because they've had a lot of monetary inflation.
When they get dollars, they monetize that.
But at the same time, we're living with the consequences of QE.
So I see this as a huge international worldwide bubble.
And one day somebody benefits, and the next day, somebody loses the advantage.
And even the dollar.
The dollar was sort of on the ropes for quite a few months.
In the last month, though, it's done better.
The circumstances are such that, well, it's, you know, the Euro and everything else is worse than us.
Third world nations are having trouble.
That gives a boost to the dollar.
But that doesn't mean the dollar really has more value.
If you could, you could be buying gasoline cheaper, you know, not more expensive, and medical care costs and the cost of living would all go down.
So that isn't happening.
But sorting this all out, as powerful as they are, and as powerful as our policymakers are, and they think they can put on sanctions and control these prices, ultimately, if they get overly interventionistic, the market will rule.
There'll be a black market or something, and they'll discount.
They cannot control prices.
And that's what they concentrate on.
They concentrate on the symptoms of what happens when you have these illusions of a fiat currency system.
And they think that what we have to do is just manipulate things, and that's how you bring prices down.
Protests and Anti-Intervention00:02:37
They'd never look at monetary policy.
The other thing that's interesting about the protests, going back to what we were saying earlier, is that usually the protests in Iran are death to America, death to Israel.
But I'd noticed it's been tweeted several times that the protests this time were different.
Death to Palestine was one of the chants.
And the other one was pro-Shah, the Shah.
It makes you wonder about this.
It's the CIA mucking around in there, giving them some strange slogans.
It's very suspicious.
Well, there was that type of advertisement for getting rid of Mossadegh.
You know, because they had to get people on their side, well, we need a new leader, and our CIA was very much involved.
But they participate.
I think your suspicions is probably pretty accurate because you sense that there's a history of this.
If this were the first time that they were attempting it and we're trying to figure it out, are they?
That would be one thing.
But we have a history to go by.
You know, when you hear this kind of news, there's always the gross distortion, which never really reaches the masses of the people in this country.
They don't even know where these places are.
And if it sounds pro-American and standing up for the flag and we drop bombs and that's about all they worry about or they're totally unconcerned about it in a real way.
But when push comes to shove and these gross distortions in the system around the world, the distribution of wealth and the financial bubbles, eventually they're going to be noticed.
But the big thing is, you know, we talked a little bit about how socialism is gaining in elections.
This is all crucial because if these conditions get worse, once again, they're going to say that it has nothing to do with government intervention and that what we need is more inventive.
We need more wisdom.
We need such and such president to run the whole show, be president of OPEC.
We have to have control to take care of our needs, which will then again just stir up more antagonism toward us.
I think there's a lot more antagonism toward America than most people realize.
Yeah, I think that's true.
Well, I would end with a tweet, actually, and this is kind of funny because we always talk about the hypocrisy of the U.S. demanding the rest of the world not do what it does in spades.
So here's Pompeo, Secretary of State, weighing in on the protests.
Iran's corrupt regime, if we can get that text in there.
Iran's Corrupt Regime00:01:05
Put it up.
Iran's corrupt regime is wasting the country's resources on Assad, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthis, while Iranians struggle.
It should surprise no one that Iran protests continue.
People are tired of the corruption, injustice, and incompetence of their leaders.
The world hears their voice talking about the foolishness of Iran's interventionism when we're the most interventionist country in the world.
You know, it wouldn't take a whole lot for a few words to be changed there.
And all of a sudden, yeah, that's us, that's us all the time.
And we, of course, communicate with a lot of true believers and people who understand that they would agree exactly with what you say.
So it's the issue of non-intervention versus intervention.
We don't have the authority to do it.
We don't have the wisdom to do it.
And it causes more trouble and grief than it never solves any problem.
So yes, I think we should think about not doing things to other people that we don't have done to us.
And that would go a long way in promoting peace and prosperity in this world.
Those are our goals.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.