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Dec. 8, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:36
The Big Rip Off: Congress Packs Military Spending Bill To Insane Level!

On a bipartisan basis the US Congress shoveled tens of billions of dollars into the already severely bloated 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The goal is to further provoke Russia and China to war, while further enriching the military-industrial complex. We'll have the good, bad, and the ugly in today's Liberty Report.

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Why Budgets Feed the Empire 00:13:46
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you here.
Happy Thursday, Dr. Paul, how are you this morning?
Doing well.
Doing well.
All right.
But when I looked at what they're doing in Washington, they're still spending a lot of money.
Oh, yeah.
You know, it's pretty bad because the way I looked at it, I was stretching this a little bit, that the president's come off as the conservative fiscal person.
Yeah, he's going to praise the NDAA.
You know, he asked for so much money and they send it into the House.
A lot of Democrats, but a lot of Republicans.
They say, no, NDAA, this is important.
This is to maintain our empire.
Oh, no, they didn't say that.
The empire has to be fed, and the Congress does that.
And I think it's amazing that the Congress is failing in their duty to maybe be more fiscally conservative.
But that is the bill, the bill got passed.
It was $858 billion.
But you say, well, it's a little bit more than last year, 8%, more than they asked for.
And they added $45 billion.
But still, and we'll probably mention this as we go through the bill a little bit.
This isn't the end of it.
And there was a principle that in my mind I always followed that if they come up short, they talk about the budget and they pass it and think that, ah, it's done for the year.
And there's always an emergency budget.
I wonder how many years they've ever gone by without an emergency.
There's always a foreign policy event or a natural event, you know, weather event, tornadoes and hurricanes and all.
So there's always reason to do it.
And they're always prepared for it.
So these numbers are important.
And the way the discussion goes is important.
But it's still a little bit more fluff than we need.
And besides, the biggest fluff is this has nothing to do with national defense.
This has to do with maintaining an empire for the benefit of the military industrial complex.
It's a profit system for a group of people that right now, I understand if you sort them all out, it's at one, less than one percent.
There's always been a discrepancy between the rich and the poor.
That's just the way society has worked, just about all societies.
And this time, though, the numbers are more drastically different than ever before.
The 1% minus maybe a tenth of 1%.
They are very, very wealthy.
This is one of the places where it starts.
Then there's competition, though, on who's the top dog, and that's the pharmaceutical companies.
They make a little money, too.
Yeah, they do.
Well, let's put up that first clip.
Now, this is from Politico, and I just found it interesting to see how they frame it.
You know, of course, because it's not really about the country, it's about Team R versus Team D.
So they say, is the NDAA a victory for Kevin McCarthy?
You know, McCarthy, who's on track to be the Speaker of the House in the next Congress, faces a lot of criticism.
He's known as kind of the old guard, not a risk-taker, et cetera, et cetera.
So everything is framed in this way.
And you're right.
That's why it's really interesting to see how Politico and how basically all the mainstream media, if you can put on that next clip, this is from the Politico article.
And this is how they frame it.
Don't look now, but Congress is on the verge of delivering yet another bipartisan smackdown to President Joe Biden.
So it sounds like it's a real smackdown.
And they say, after weeks of haggling, the House is set to vote later today to pass a compromise version of the NDAA that endorses a significantly bigger defense budget than Biden sought.
So the smackdown of Biden is for the Republicans to shovel billions and billions of more into this bill.
That's the smackdown.
Yeah, they can turn it around, make it a great victory.
But it is fascinating that it's politico that we look to with a piece of information that might be legitimate.
Yeah, a little bit of reporting, yeah.
But, you know, even the effort by Congresswoman Greene, she said that we should audit what's going on.
And that was in the committee.
And that was a close vote.
And she says that she's going to bring that up again.
But that was the whole thing that Rand had worked on in the Senate.
Well, why in the world would they be voting against, just paying attention?
Why wouldn't the American people be outraged for it?
But I think that sentiment may have changed.
You know, that vote was close.
So the people may be waking up that at least you ought to have an audit.
I think that was one of the reasons that we could do well in getting the Congress or at least the House to support, audit the Fed bill, was, well, why can't you have transparency?
It's an issue that's appealing to Republicans and Democrats, honest ones, and liberals and conservatives.
And it should be used more often, but they should follow through with it, you know, and actually audit these funds because, you know, they don't do any auditing of the Pentagon.
Well, they do, but it fails every time.
It fails.
It doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't help them.
They don't pay any attention to it.
Yeah, that was an important vote.
It was 26 to 22 on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Marjorie Taylor Greene's bill.
It was supported by Massey, Gates, Barry Moore of Alabama, and Andrew Clyde of Georgia.
They were co-sponsors.
It was a close vote.
The thing is, it's pretty interesting, though, if you look at this, because in a way, being in favor of this audit has a political component, as everything does in Washington.
And so Michael McCall, probably the biggest hawk in Congress, he's all for it, too.
But he's, of course, all for it for political reasons.
He doesn't want to stop sending money.
He probably would like to double the money to go into Ukraine.
But he wants to use that audit to show how badly the Democrats bungled it.
Right.
We'll do it better.
We'll waste money better.
So not to oppose the bill.
You're right, Dr. Paul.
Absolutely, there should be a real serious audit of what's happened.
But it's just interesting to see how the other side jumps on this bandwagon to continue to push their agenda as well.
And as we mentioned earlier this week, Adam Smith on the committee, Democrat from Washington, said that concerns about all of these weapons possibly getting in the right hands, or the wrong hands, is just Russian propaganda.
So we'll see, hopefully Marjorie Taylor Greene does reintroduce this bill in the next Congress where it may have some more push.
But I want to look at one other thing, too, that was in the political article, and I think it was covered in anti-war.com as well, if you can put on the next clip.
Because I know you're going to, I didn't show this to you before, but I know you're going to get a kick out of this.
So lawmakers are using that larger price tag, i.e. all the money they dumped into it, to dedicate billions to building more Navy ships and buying more aircraft.
Just what we need, right?
Refighting World War II.
That's exactly what our military needs to do.
But this is the part that gets me.
You're going to love this.
They also touted putting $19 billion toward defraying the cause, the effects of high inflation.
So they're spending $19 billion more of our dollars to defray the costs of inflation.
That's like drinking to get sober or something.
For some reason, when I see this happening and it's all done in the name of national security and protecting our Constitution and that sort of thing, I never feel better.
It's a threat.
They're intimidating us.
But, you know, I do want to mention one of the things that the Republicans talk about right now is the Afghanistan thing.
We need to sort that out and find out how could anybody mess up like that.
But I think they're missing the point.
I think Afghanistan might have the record for the number of years that we stayed in there.
And here, the reason that the Soviets failed is because they were in Afghanistan too long, but they wised up and got out in a year or two.
Here we were 20 years, and now the investigation is how did we mess up getting out?
But they don't talk about how did we get involved?
That's where the discussion should be.
Has the Constitution failed?
No, the people failed the Constitution.
You know, the system did.
But in a way, you could say that the Constitution failed to rein in the people, but the founders understood there'd be limitations.
You have to have honest people if you want the Constitution really to work.
But they went along with it.
And Afghanistan, we've been involved there, and it's always for good purposes.
It just tears me up when I see either the views on television of Afghan history, of the people, how many people were killed, how many people are now, you know, without their limbs.
And it's also unnecessary.
But then again, if you bring that subject up in that way, you know, at the slightest hint, then all of a sudden you get labeled, you don't care about the troops.
You're un-American.
Yeah.
I wonder why the troops sort of support the idea of not fighting unnecessary wars.
But they don't talk about that.
They talk about these other things, what weaponry they're going to make.
And add how many other countries are we going to add that we have to boost our weaponry?
And we're doing that.
We'll mention a couple in a minute.
Yeah.
Well, anyone thinks that we have to spend more money on our military because we have to be better and better and better.
We have the largest military budget in history, as everyone knows that watches this show, larger than the next nine or ten countries combined.
Yet we fought a third world country for 20 years with the largest military budget in the world and lost.
So what does that tell you about throwing money at this problem?
It's not a way to win wars.
The military is supposed to win wars.
We lost after 20 years to a third world country.
But I did, and I wrote in the description, we're going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly in this.
And this one I would put under the category of the good, but with a caveat.
So if we can put up this next, this is a little bit of good news, Dr. Paul.
We need some good news.
And this is from, again, from the political article.
One of the marquee fights may be the NDAA's repeal of the Pentagon's vaccine mandate, which requires troops to get the COVID shot or be forced out of the military.
The rollback is a big win for Republicans who pushed to kill the policy, including House GOP leader and presumptive speaker to be Kevin McCarthy.
Some GOP senators even threatened to stall the must-pass bill without the change.
And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, Senator Paul was one of those who said he would stall it.
So that is great.
You're no longer kicked out of the military if you don't get the jab.
However, I'm going to pour a little cold water on this, Dr. Paul, because I'm going to show a series of tweets from Representative Chip Roy, who is from our own area down here in Texas, who occasionally is very, very good on things and definitely a plain-spoken person.
Here's five tweets that he explains why it's not the victory that we think it is.
He says the NDAA ending the tyrannical COVID vaccine mandate is not enough.
It fails our unvaccinated service members in several key areas.
Now, click over to the next one.
Here's why this repeal is not enough.
He says the language does nothing to stop the military from retaliating against unvaccinated service members, including forcing them to wear masks, refusing to deploy them, excluding them from other valuable career opportunities.
They plan to do this.
Now do the next one.
We'll get through this real quick.
This is why it's not all that great.
This language allows the U.S. Army to continue restricting unvaccinated soldiers from official travel, cutting them off from vital career advancement opportunities.
Next one, please.
Almost done.
This bill does absolutely nothing to help the thousands of service members Biden's Defense Department has already fired for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
And finally, his recommendation, with which I think you will agree, Dr. Paul, Congress must require Biden's Defense Department to immediately reinstate every single one of the unvaccinated service members they fired who wishes to return to duty.
This NDAA does not.
I think he makes some great points.
So maybe it's a little bit of progress.
You're not kicked out immediately, but here, here's a mask, put it on and go sit in that corner.
You can't do anything else.
So they want to pretend, oh, we love our service members.
Thank you for your service.
You're the greatest of all.
But they are treating them extremely badly.
And thanks to Representative Chip Roy for pointing it out.
You know, the one thing about this whole debate going on continuously is with the military right now, but it still exists in our country and around the world.
It hasn't disappeared.
But it has nothing to do with health.
Yeah.
That isn't the subject.
And I think they realize that we know that, but it has to do with control.
And military, it has to be absolute control.
Any hint of that, you know, destroys the whole concept of the military.
But this is mixing things up.
They take a health issue, they use that to terrorize the people.
Control And Patriotism 00:14:04
And then you're not patriotic if you don't go along with it.
But it's control, control, control.
And we certainly saw the worst of that, you know, during the epidemic, so-called epidemic.
But now things have been a little bit better, but we still have this going on.
But, you know, I recall one time that one of the causes for the downfall of the Roman Empire was too much Mickey Mouse around with their military.
You know, they spread the military out, they had too many rules and regulations, and they weren't serving the function of the state.
You know, in a way, that's about what's happening now.
Is even if they could really justify a real word, a real war, you know, to defend this country, the discipline is still going to be a problem.
But the discipline right now is the discipline with the American people to ask questions carefully with the people they send to Washington to see if they might be interested in talking about a sensible foreign policy and one that defends the country.
And we hear words like that more than we used to, and that is, why aren't we defending our own borders?
You know, they sort of visualize that a little bit better than, you know, no, we don't need to send any help over there to Ukraine.
But that'll come.
But it took a long time in Vietnam, took a long time in Korea, took a long time in the Middle East.
It took a long time in Afghanistan.
When are we going to learn?
You know, just wake up.
And unfortunately, I'm optimistic on the long run for things to get better, but on the short run, we have to go through a real educational system.
The education is the conclusion of what happens when we do to ourselves what we have done, that we have to go through the bankruptcy.
And there has to be another attention given to the morality of the people as well as to the morality of money.
So you can't have a counterfeit machine doing this and operating a world empire.
So it will end.
But the tragedy is, is how many other people are going to suffer from this?
These places we're putting more money all the time.
We have to stop China.
I have to stop China.
And to me, I think it's just they don't understand economics well enough to defend the position.
I was hearing somebody the other day on one of the national programs that said, you know, I just don't buy this, that China is this evil.
The opening up the doors, the Nixon deal, it wasn't like it helped America or helped China.
It's sort of one of these things when you have economic exchanges and they're voluntary, you help both sides.
But no, now that's blasphemy.
That means you're unpatriotic if he would suggest that you should talk to other people and actually trade with people.
So we still have a job for ourselves.
We do.
And our real fight is against this false idea that more military spending makes us safer and is patriotic.
Because the opposite is the true.
If you bankrupt the country, you're not making us safer.
If you provoke other countries to attack us, you're not making us safer.
And there's nothing patriotic, as you know, Dr. Paul, I need to tell you, about our economy going down and losing our country.
But the one thing I think about when I read this bill and I see how much money is being spent is inflation and what that does.
And you talk a lot about what it does to the average person.
And that's why I do, when talking about inflation, I do want to mention the sponsor of our show, 4patriots.com, 4Patriots, the number 4patriots.com, because one of the things that happens with inflation is it's difficult to feed your family.
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Very good.
I want to bring up a subject of another country that we were very much involved with in the 60s.
I don't think it was mentioned in the NDAA, but the principles are there.
It has to do with the G7 and Vietnam.
And most people think the Vietnam War is over.
No, we're continuing to lose.
But we are G7.
And the G7, the authorities, when we were at our behalf, said that we'll give you $2 billion if you become greeny.
But I think Vietnamese have coal, and it works pretty well for them.
And I would think one tragedy I think about on this issue is that they don't go to a real good product, and that is nuclear energy, which is very, very clean.
And there are some environmentalists that are thinking along those lines.
But they offered, they went to visit with them a couple months ago, and they offered $2 billion.
No, we don't want that.
But now the G7, well, they didn't get bribed very easily.
How about $15 billion?
We'll give you if you'll build more windmills.
Try some of that sunshine.
Get out there and say, use some sunshine.
So, and you know of the $15 billion, nobody for a minute assumes it's going to come from anybody other than American taxpayers.
Yeah, yeah.
And sometimes it doesn't come directly from the American taxpayer.
It comes from the printing presses, which means that the innocent really pay the taxes, and they're not always in this country, but it's never the wealthy as much as it is in the middle class that pays these bills because of the inflation tax.
I wish the G7 would offer us a billion dollars to go green in the Rom Paul studios.
We have a green screen.
We're started.
There you go.
So I don't know.
I mean, I guess they never offer it to us.
But I'm going to mention one final thing that I had in my agenda.
You may have a couple of other things, Dr. Paul, but if you can skip to the second to last, I'm going to skip over a couple of things in this NDAA.
I want people's eyes to glaze over too much.
But it's, we must not forget the U.S. war on Afghanistan.
This is our good friend Jacob Hornberger.
He wrote a terrific piece in Future of Freedom Foundation, FFF.org, today, and we have it featured on the Ron Paul Institute page as well.
But he makes some really, really good points, and he puts it together in a great way.
And I'm going to just read a little bit of this.
He said, when the Pentagon used NATO to provoke Russia into invading Ukraine, it had to know that one of the great benefits to such an invasion would be that it would enrich U.S. weapons manufacturers, who, of course, are an important, integral, and loyal part of America's national security state form of governmental structure.
And he goes through and talks about how this did enrich the military-industrial complex.
But he makes an important point at the end, if we can do that next clip.
He says, using NATO to gin up the crisis in Ukraine is bad enough.
While U.S. arms manufacturers are clearly a beneficiary of that crisis, so is the Pentagon, because it has caused people to forget what the Pentagon did to the people of Afghanistan and just move on to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
And then he goes on to say we must not let that happen.
His main point, Dr. Paul, is just when the debacle of our exit of Afghanistan, making it very obvious that the U.S. lost after 20 years, was going to result in a serious reduction of military spending.
That gravy train had come to a station, come to an end, a terminus.
They needed to gin this up, and Ukraine was a wonderful, wonderful way, and it's produced benefits, a windfall of benefits to the military-industrial complex.
They gin it up, and so the pipeline of money continues.
But also, no one is saying, hey, wait a minute, didn't you guys mess up Afghanistan?
So it's a twofer.
Hats off to our good friend Jacob Hornberger for pointing this out, I think.
Yeah, just think of the difference it would have been after the Cold War ended, 1990, if we wouldn't have engaged in expanding the empire and spending money and doing all of these things.
Where would that money have gone?
There would have been no need to inflate the currency.
There was still tremendous wealth.
There's still a lot of wealth.
But right now, it isn't earned.
It's unearned, and it's there by debt.
And it's the debt that is the big burden because we've borrowed the money.
Now we have to borrow the money to pay the interest on the debt we borrowed before.
It's sort of like a snowball going on.
But I just think that people have to realize that it's a constant, it's a constant thing.
I want to mention this other one here, U.S. to increase military presence in Australia.
Those poor people, they came to our aid in World War II when we had to get out of the way of the Japanese, build up aimed at China.
But it's all China, China, China.
I don't know whether they want us to distract us from Ukraine or what, or they're happy with all that spending.
Maybe they have to equalize the lobbyists.
Oh, you're ignoring us.
We're not getting in the same amount of time that the lobbyists for Ukraine get for going after more funding.
Because these are just loaded with the emphasis on the Far East and China.
There was one thing here that DeCamp wrote.
He says, Indonesia's president expressed similar concerns during the meeting of the Association of South Asian Nations in November, saying they must not let the region turn into a front line for a new Cold War.
I mean, what are they doing then?
Oh, maybe it's a hot war they want.
Yeah, yeah.
So there are some people that sort of like that.
I read an article, and I can't quote the name, and that means it's totally unreliable, maybe, except I happen to believe in that they say that about 5% of the people, we have a lot of good people in the military.
I was there, and there's good people in the military.
But there is a theory there that about 5% go in and they love it because they're psychopathic.
You know, and that's how you can explain some of these atrocious, violent killing in the military.
You know, it's just over the top.
And you see it in every war.
So that to me is a real problem.
I just want to do a quick shout out to a couple of our Rumble ranters.
Brewster McRuster sent in $20 saying, government spending your money without your permission after stealing it from you.
A sound policy.
And also Dennis Marburger sent in $21.
The NDAA is a grab bag of tyranny, theft, and violations of the rights of the Americans.
There are 43 to 22 reasons to oppose and nullify the NDA, thanks to all of our Rumble ranters.
Very good.
You know, during the presidential races that I was involved in, the NDAA came up frequently.
And I was always amazed and pleased that the initiation of the interest in the NDA didn't come from me like it might have, you know, in the monetary issue and auditing the Fed and all.
But it was so often it was young people on college campuses that would want to know about the NDAA.
It was just sort of, you know, the beginning of a popular interest in this.
So that gave me encouragement, and I think it always should.
But that is what we should be doing, spreading ideas, ideas where you introduce ideas, but also listening to what they're talking about and give them credit when young people are concerned about the problems and sometimes have a cleaner mind compared to, oh, I work for, you know, I work for the military industrial complex.
I can't say that.
I have a good job there, you know.
So it is there.
And besides, the one reason why we want to go there and we emphasize it and want to improve our effort to reach people with the ideas of why we should argue for peace and prosperity is we don't have a whole lot of choices because we reject the notion that, well, you know, we don't like what China's doing.
Some of them would say, well, let's go bomb them.
Some people argue that case that we need to do this and using violence, it doesn't work.
So we're going to stick by our guns and believe that the road to peace and prosperity is to change the foreign policy, not to accept what we have and tinker with it and doctor it up and try to explain what we could do now to make it look a little less violent than it really is.
What we have to do is show that non-intervention foreign policy means that we mind our own business and we never get involved in a war unless the people speak through their members of Congress and they vote for it, rather than a president coming along and with an executive order get us involved.
Worrying Borders, Tired People 00:00:51
That was one of the things that has always bugged me for a long time is maybe this mess really started with Truman and that is you know getting us into the Korean War with oh this is not a war.
This is a police action and the American people.
You'd think they'd have been sick and tired of the war by then because we're just getting over World War II but no, we marched on and ever since then it's just a matter of the presidents acting beyond their authority, the Congress going to sleep and not paying attention and the people not paying much attention because it will take the people to wake up as they're starting to.
Why are we over in Ukraine worrying about those borders when we ought to be worrying about our own borders?
And I think it's a good argument.
It calls attention to a little bit of common sense that we need.
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