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Dec. 31, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:57
Ron, Daniel & Chris: Reflecting On The Past & Anticipating The Future

Ron Paul, Daniel McAdams & Chris Rossini discuss their thoughts on what 2020 may have in store for us. The election, the economy, the military empire...this show covers it all! Please don't forget to make a year-end, tax-deductible donation to the Ron Paul Institute before midnight tonight and keep the Ron Paul Liberty Report alive and growing! Go to: http://www.RonPaulInstitute.org/support

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Concern Word 2020 00:06:42
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into this special Ron Paul Liberty report.
This is the end of the year, but the beginning of a new year, and I'm going to have two co-hosts today.
Of course, Chris Rossini will be with me, as well as Daniel McAdams.
And we'll just talk about what's happened in the past, some of our opinions about that, and also talk about what we anticipate for the new year.
We don't claim perfection in our predictions, but our concerns basically over the years have borne out to be pretty accurate in that some of the policies that we have, it isn't so much that we know what's going to happen as we are aware of the fact that certain policies lead to certain consequences.
And of course, our goal has been to try to warn people.
And if anybody's listening in the government, to warn the government, why don't you change some of these policies that we're having so much trouble?
So, you know, from the current economic viewpoint, when you listen to the media, it's been the most fantastic year ever.
The economy's been good.
And if you were going to measure our foreign policy by body bags, people would claim, you know, things aren't like the 1960s.
So I want to go over that, but I want to start with Chris for us, for him to give us a bit of an opinion about what he sees in the economy and what we can expect and where we go from here.
Chris?
Thank you, Dr. Paul, very much.
For 2020, definitely concern is the word I would use.
And I'll start with the most obvious, and that would be the election at the end of the year.
And I fear that the reaction to the election will not be like before.
Hopefully I'm wrong about that.
But because of the intense emotion that has been force-fed to the American people and has been embraced by at least one side, it's the left I'm talking about, I fear that the reaction will not be good.
And I'm already seeing that Russia is already to blame, and we're not even close to November, so they already have that lined up.
And the concern is not so much with the election itself, but what happens after and then what happens after that?
Because governments react when there is civil unrest, and that's when they tend to capitalize and grab more power for themselves and take away our liberty.
And it's always masked in the words temporary, emergency.
But as we all know in the libertarian world, that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary emergency law.
So that's my first concern.
My second would be the financial aspect.
And Dr. Paul and I cover that at least once a week.
And we've pointed out that we're in the biggest financial bubble to ever exist.
The Federal Reserve is doing exactly the wrong thing.
They're pumping money faster than they did in the first QE.
We have crushing debts everywhere in all aspects of life, whether it be government, corporations, personal, everybody is swimming in debt.
And, you know, financial crisis itself, it breeds anger when it happens.
And people seek revenge against those who they believe did this to them.
Now, who they believe and who actually did this to them are often not the same people, but it'll go the way it goes.
And again, this provides another excuse for government to make things even worse, whether it be through price controls, rationing, capital controls.
That's when they squeeze the hardest is when there's crisis.
And finally, there's what Dr. Paul and Daniel talk about most of the week, and that is war.
And there are so many tinderboxes out there.
The U.S. is literally involved everywhere.
And it's really a grab bag.
If they want a war, that's probably the easiest thing that they can do.
It's probably easier to start than a financial crisis because they're just everywhere.
And as Dr. Paul and Daniel have explained, you know, the tactic of the powers behind the throne, the neocons, is to maneuver the president no matter who he is.
And they don't care what his views are, whether he doesn't want war, whether he wants.
They want to maneuver him into a position to where they checkmate him, to where his only options is to choose war.
And, you know, when you look at what's happening, especially even today, you know, things appear to be moving in that direction.
So concern is my word for 2020.
And when there is turbulent times, you know, it provides opportunity.
Obviously, libertarians want to capitalize, but there's also the other side.
We have the power.
Globalists are what they're called these days.
And it's, you know, globalists, they have that name today, but it's really nothing new because if you look throughout all history, conquerors, they've always wanted to, you know, have their ideas, whatever they happen to be, to conquer the world.
So, you know, there will be people that will try to capitalize from the power perspective, but they can't ultimately, in our view, get what they want, which is total control, because there are infinite variables when it comes to natural phenomena.
And humans are, by nature, unpredictable.
We are unique in how we perceive the world and how we choose to act by what we perceive, we learn, and all of this stuff cannot be predicted with precision.
So that's why globalists can't succeed no matter how hard they try and how many thousands of years they try.
But they can cause a lot of problems and a lot of destruction.
And that's where we libertarians come in, because our ideas, I believe, are in line with human nature.
We accept the world as it is, that it's uncertain, unpredictable.
And we believe in that environment, the ideas of non-aggression, voluntarism, you know, that's the way to go.
And that's the way to peace and prosperity.
Hey, Russians Interfered Again 00:04:43
Very, very good, Chris.
Very well said.
Now we're going to go to Daniel and hear his assessment on how things are going.
And we'll try to find out whether he's going to be an optimist for next year or cautiously warning us of what's to come.
Daniel, go ahead.
Thanks very much, Dr. Paul.
You know, I look back over 2019 and the news has been dominated, of course, by RussiaGate, which then morphed into UkraineGate.
And that dominated the headlines because that's what the media wants to report.
They wanted to report for the first half of the year that Trump was only in power because the Russians put him in power and he colluded with them.
And then the Mueller report came and it pulled the rug out from the entire thesis.
And you would have thought they would have gone home with their tails between their legs.
But no, they're much more shameless than that.
So when it turns out that not only was Trump not colluding with the Russians to get elected, but The claim that the Russians interfered in the election, this famous intelligence community assessment of 2017, what we found out this year, which is so important, is that it wasn't worth the scrap of paper that it was printed on because this great intelligence community assessment was John Brennan getting together a couple of guys in a room saying,
Hey, I need a report telling us that the Russians interfered with the election.
And they essentially admitted it, hand-picked analysts.
And that's why the NSA did not give it a good housekeeping seal of approval, even as it was advertised.
But again, it didn't stop their stride.
They moved right into Ukraine gate, and that eventually ended up in the impeachment or the semi-impeachment or whatever it is.
Nobody knows what it is of President Trump.
And Dr. Paul, you and I, and I know Chris, we watched the proceedings with some amusement and some disgust, probably a lot of disgust.
And the entire charade proves one point, which is that the deep state is still very, very strongly in charge of foreign policy.
Trump seems to be absolutely impotent, incapable of doing any kind of battle with the deep state.
There were no crimes that were brought up.
And even the Democrats had to admit there were no crimes.
They had to talk about obstruction and abuse of power.
No other president does that.
And it turns out, witness after witness that came up to witness against Trump, they didn't witness any crime.
What they said is, hey, he was trying to change our policy toward Ukraine.
He can't do that.
Who does he think he is?
But this is what it was all about.
But Trump, he's hapless.
He just never gets it.
I don't know what the problem is, if he's just not interested in this stuff, if he likes to do rallies rather than do policy.
But, you know, gentlemen, as we sit here, the U.S. Embassy is under attack in Baghdad.
Trump, in his usual way, gets the whole thing wrong.
He's listening to the wrong people.
He's listening to Pompey or telling him, hey, it's all Iran.
It's all Iran.
And he just tweeted out this morning, the Iranians are attacking our embassy.
So he's sleepwalking us into another war.
The reason that the Iraqis are mad and are attacking our embassy is that the U.S. bombed some Iraqi government troops, the paramilitary units that were actually, ironically, and we talked about this yesterday, on the front lines of fighting ISIS.
The U.S. decided that they needed to be bombed.
And so that's why the Iraqis are mad and they're also sick of having us in their country.
But the neocons around Trump have turned it around and he's now claiming that Iran is responsible, which I guess brings me to my closing in this particular segment of what we're doing, which is the 2020 election.
And I think, you know, it's pretty easy to call it for Trump simply because his opposition is so weak and so much worse than he is.
My one caveat would be: if Trump does take the neocon bait and lead us into this war, lead us into Iraq War 3.0, which is actually a war on Iran.
If that happens, then I'd say all bets are off because the Democrats might actually wake up.
Of course, they won't believe it, but then they pretend that they're anti-war if Trump stumbles us into another dumb war.
So he's in very, very shaky territory right now.
He's listening to the wrong people, the people that are telling lies.
They lied us into Iraq.
They're still lying.
And we'll see.
Gold Standard Controversy 00:12:49
I'm not very optimistic that Trump has the ability to think through this very well.
Very good.
You know, and then if you add on to this the possibility of a sharp downturn in the economy before the election, he will have some problems.
But I want to talk about an issue that I've talked about for a long time.
Matter of fact, motivated me to get involved in politics because I thought it was very significant.
That has to do with the issue of money, the monetary policy.
And I want to very briefly go through what I see as the history of sound money versus the fiat money.
But, you know, the sound money, gold and silver, the precious metals, came about in a natural way.
It came out of the marketplaces.
And when it was seen as money, governments eventually wanted to have the monopoly over this.
And then they would do this and issue currencies and actually get control of it so they could abuse it and create it or fool the people.
And that started a long time ago.
But, you know, subsequently, in more recent history, and the history that I looked at when I got interested in politics and talking about this issue was the fact that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.
Gold was $20 an ounce.
And since then, it's been a systematic attack on the value of the currency.
And this was absolutely necessary in order to finance the welfare warfare state.
That's what we're talking about.
The economic policies of spending, no concerns for the deficits.
And it is the coalition between right and left, Republicans and Democrats, to spend more money by abusing the monetary system.
You know, the Fed came into existence in 1913, but in a short period of time of 20 years, the thing the FDR did was take the gold from all the American people, you know, because of the policies led to the Great Depression.
They figured, well, it's this gold business and we need to print a lot of money.
So it didn't take a long time to undermine that principle in this past century.
But then again, the system required that we make an adjustment after World War II.
And we had the gold and we were spared a lot of the damage by World War II.
And lo and behold, we came up with a new policy in 1944, which we orchestrated along with the help of some other countries that would have some benefits.
In 1944, they started the Bretton Woods Agreement, which meant we had a gold reserve currency.
The dollar was to be as good as gold, and we would guarantee that $35 an ounce, which was a hoax.
But it conveyed confidence in the dollar so that it gave us license to print and run up and expand our empire.
Well, that was not going to be long-lasting.
And from the very beginning, many people knew it would fail.
And lo and behold, it was a big event.
In August of 1971, the Bretton Woods fell apart.
And that was the day that really stirred my interest because that event was predictable.
It happened.
And the whole thing collapsed.
The whole idea of gold at $35 an ounce was a farce.
Before you knew it, it was up to $800.
And it's been all over the place ever since.
But one good thing happened as a consequence of this.
They were trying to prove that gold was not money.
And so they decided that we would de-emphasize that point.
And something happened in 1975.
As I was getting interested in this issue, we found out that, you know, the people responded and gold was re-legalized in this country.
And that was a significant benefit, actually, to the establishment as well as everybody else because it was a better measurement of what they were doing.
But the financing of big government has continued.
We still face major crises.
We finance the deficits, conservative or liberals.
We run up over a trillion dollar debt per year.
It's going to expand.
It's not going to stop, but it's not going to be reversed, not in the near future.
And we do have to be concerned that, you know, if Trump gets into political trouble, that he will be pushed and there may well be a hot war in order to distract from what's happening.
But there is another date that I want to mention that I think is going to prove to be a significant day.
And that was September 17th, 2019, just a couple of months ago.
And that was the day the Fed woke up. completely surprised and shocked.
Oh my goodness, my goodness, the overnight rates are 10%.
What's going on?
There's a shortage of money, a shortage of money.
They created all these trillions of dollars, but there was a shortage of money because they were trying to shrink the size of the balance sheet from 4.3 trillion down to a little bit less than $4 trillion.
And this meant there was a shortage because there was an expanded need for money, and that was from the deficit.
And so there wasn't enough to finance the repo.
So since that time, the Fed has created a $500 billion safety net in order to bail the system out.
And there's another temporary reprieve from it at the moment.
But that is the system.
I think this is another sign of the bankruptcy of this country, the inevitability that the dollar is going to suffer these consequences.
And the good news is it's going to make us as a country and as a nation to reassess our values.
And hopefully they will listen to our viewpoint.
And that means we have to think about the foreign policy.
We have to think of the distorted, out-of-control Keynesian economic theory that spending isn't a problem and debt isn't a problem.
You know, there's another term that has come out recently that is in the news and in the election.
And that is they claim right now that the wild-eyed socialists right now want to have a new monetary policy, modern monetary theory.
But it's not really new.
It's not exactly modern.
It's an exaggeration and a making of worse the system we have today that there should be no limits on spending in order to make everybody equal.
Everybody has an equal thing and destroy the marketplace.
We have to have enough money for whatever the government wants to do and how you redistribute wealth around the country.
So that is there, but it's really nothing new.
It's just the end stages of the hopes that they can pull this out of the fire like they did after World War II.
I mean, it was a mess and they reestablished it with Bretton Woods, always with a system that was doomed to fail.
So they'll be working on that.
I think they will continue to.
They will be forced to do it.
And I think one of our jobs from our program is to send a message out that there is a lot of information out there that if you have to redo the monetary system, why don't we move in a modern sense of, you know, even the gold standard could be improved over what we've had in the past, but it has to be, people have to be convinced that it's in their interest to do so.
And I think that contest is going to continue.
But we're reaching the climactic end of the current system, and something will have to be done.
And those who want more power want more authority.
And they're the ones who want to tinker with the current system and call it modern monetary theory.
And once again, keep it going.
So that's what I'll continue to think about and write about and talk about because none of the problems that we have today can exist if there's no finance to it.
Can tax, and they have, and they've gotten away with that, but there's not enough money out there to tax to pay for this extreme spending.
So, they, of course, can borrow and people will loan money, but it looks like with the overnight rates, there wasn't enough money out there to carry on the charade of monetary management.
So, the only thing left to do is to massively increase the money supply.
That's what they did with the recession, depression of 2008 and 2009.
But they're back at it again.
And they said, if it's necessary, if this crisis continues, we will produce a trillion dollars to bail out the banks.
And they say, but this isn't QE.
This is something different.
Yeah, something different.
It's QE plus.
But monetary policy is important to all of us because it's the instrument for financing all the things that we don't like them doing.
You know, we don't like big government doing things and running, you know, getting involved in wars that we shouldn't be involved.
So that is my assessment.
I think this problem is going to get worse, and we may see some major, major economic and monetary consequences of what I noticed on September 17th of this past year, where the Fed woke up and found out, my goodness, our fixing the rate between 1 and 2% isn't working and we don't have enough money.
And they were immediately able to pump in $500 billion in order to prop up the system for a while longer.
So, of course, our goal is liberty and voluntary markets.
And that will continue to be our goal.
And that involves people like Daniel, who understands the foreign policy issues very well, and Chris, who is very much involved in studying economic policy.
But I'm going to pause there right now and let's see if Chris has any add-on here to make a comment about what we've been talking about.
Yes, Dr. Paul, I'll add and echo you actually from the financial point of view.
And I'm sure Daniel will do the foreign policy.
But it's, you know, the sound money is the important issue.
You know, we hear a lot the words deep state, deep state, and of course that's going to get mangled as to what it means.
But, you know, if you want to talk about the deep state, well, the Federal Reserve is maybe at the helm of the whole thing because they make it possible by counterfeiting money.
And their counterfeiting money affects everything.
It affects the election and even the reason why people care so much about which politician gets elected because they're all buying votes.
They're handing out free stuff, promising this, promising that.
Well, how can you promise without the funds to do it?
And the funds can be created literally out of thin air by typing into a keyboard by the Federal Reserve.
So they affect the elections.
They affect, obviously, the economy.
They create the bubbles, the booms, the busts.
And we keep going through them over and over, whether it's NASDAQ, housing, now the stock market again, and housing and debts.
And then finally, it's the wars.
Why doesn't New Zealand pretend to be the policeman of the world?
Well, they don't have the counterfeiting machine or the military to make sure everybody uses the counterfeit money.
So the Fed really lies at the heart of this problem.
You're not going to hear that, unfortunately, from mainstream sources.
And, you know, but what they're most concerned about is what we cover most of the week: the wars and trying to control the world, which they obviously are doing a terrible job, even if they think they're doing it.
But they don't listen if we don't want them to do the wars.
They don't care who we vote for.
They don't care what the president thinks if he doesn't want the wars.
So, this is a very big problem, and it really boils down to people wanting money that is sound, that cannot be created out of thin air.
And then it won't matter what the government wants because their hands will be tied because they can't have this with sound money.
All right.
Okay, very, very good, Chris.
Now, Daniel, do you have some comments to make?
Yeah, just a couple of closing thoughts, really.
And I would just say that looking ahead, you know, the scandal of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, the OPCW, is something that should be of enormous, enormous importance to the world.
The Scandal of Our Time 00:04:41
Probably the scandal of our time.
This is where reports of a chemical attack in Douma, Syria were falsified by this UN organization, which is paid by the U.S. and apparently under U.S. pressure to falsify the report and make it look like Assad was behind the attack to justify Trump shooting from the hip a couple of days after the so-called attack and bombing Syria.
It turns out the whole thing was a farce.
But the news doesn't cover it.
The mainstream media has not covered it.
They've ignored it.
And so I would say the most significant happening of our time is essentially the end of news.
There is no news anymore.
It's simply propaganda.
If it fits the party line, it'll be reported.
If it doesn't, it'll be ignored.
And that makes our job both harder and easier.
It's harder because we say things that people haven't heard and it shocks and surprises them.
It's easier because we don't have a lot of competition on telling the truth.
So I look forward to the next year and continuing to do this as long as the social media platforms that we enjoy will allow us the opportunity to do so.
And my final thought would be just to remember, just to remind our listeners, today is the last day to make your contribution, your tax-deductible contribution to the Ron Paul Institute and have it count towards your 2019 taxes.
You'll keep some money out of the hands of the war machine and you'll help the anti-war machine, which is the Ron Paul movement, as we move ahead.
You can just go to ronpaulinstitute.org and give us a little bit of support this last day of the year, and we appreciate it very, very much.
Very good, Daniel.
And, you know, I want to close with refreshing everybody's memory of a cliché that has been used many times.
And people say, well, is the economy half empty or half full?
So which way are we going?
We know that it can go either way.
In a way, I think that ultimately there's reason to be optimistic, but I think it is half empty right now.
It's going to get worse for a while.
But there's no reason to think that we can't come out of this because I just look at what's happened in our own history, our last hundred years.
Things have been really bad.
You know, just thinking about what was going on in the 60s, to me, that was so devastating.
But structurally and fundamentally, I think we're in equally bad times, even though they're quite a bit different.
But the reason I maintain some optimism is that I think philosophically, we're in pretty good shape if you exclude the government, exclude the media, and exclude our universities.
But philosophically, the information is out there.
The internet has helped us.
I mean, who would have ever dreamed that I, as an individual that didn't expect a whole lot from a political career, but get over, you know, like almost a quarter million people signed up to our program.
People are demanding and they want to know the truth, and I get positive responses from young people.
So I think philosophy is much more important than politics.
But we have to deal with politics because politics is a measuring rod of the philosophy.
So I still think it's important that we talk about issues.
We try to get the truth out and counteract what we hear in the media.
At the same time, expose people to the philosophy.
And there are so many groups now in foreign policy and economic policy that are preaching and teaching the right things.
So therefore, we have to continue to do that.
The truth is, none of us know exactly what's going to occur tomorrow or the next day, but we do know that ideas have consequences.
And because of the type of people who gravitate to the government system, are doing this out of desperation and they don't really have the answers.
And eventually things fail.
Just the fact that we're catching on and able to expose people.
But even when there wasn't an internet, ideas did spread around and there were ways to reach people.
And I hope that's what we continue to do.
I believe we are doing that to a significant degree.
And really, the people are looking for truth.
And I believe truth will win out in the end.
But I do want to thank our viewers and our visitors to our website for the support they give us.
And it's been great.
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