Did Biden Offer Saudis An Oil 'Quid Pro Quo' To Boost Dem Election Prospects?
The announced two million barrel cut per day from OPEC+ was a heavy body blow to President Biden and the Democrats as they face what may be very rocky mid-term elections. Did Biden pressure the Saudis to hold off on the cuts until after the elections? Also today, a CPI nuke was dropped on the US economy. Finally, how democratic is Germany?
Get your tickets to the Ron Paul Institute's Lake Jackson Conference: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shut-up-cancel-culture-and-the-war-on-speech-tickets-421629353747
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.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing just fine.
Good.
All right.
Better than the economy, I think.
Yeah, we try to be deaf.
But that's not much of a challenge, isn't it?
That's true.
But they sure try to mess everybody up because frugality, you know, working hard and living within your means and saving your money and planning for the future in a rainy day.
That's considered the worst advice you can ever give a young person.
You know, when I think about me saving money when I was a teenager in order to go to school, there's not much future in that now.
Except those free student loans, that wasn't a very good future either.
That's caused a little bit of mess.
And who said they had to pay him back?
And who says they will?
But anyway, we want to talk a little bit today about Biden.
He's a little bit unhappy with the oil prices.
And it's the Republicans' fault.
We know that.
And it's Trump's fault.
We know that.
It's not his fault at all.
But he was putting some pressure on the Saudis.
It was the Saudis' fault.
And I was thinking about back when Trump became president, his first trip.
Where was it?
It was to Israel and to Saudi Arabia.
He wanted to stay on good terms with them.
But Biden is not doing well.
And he's putting a lot of pressure on them.
And he doesn't want them to cut production, which he claims is political, probably too.
But it's probably a little bit disingenuous since it's all a political thing going on.
The whole money issue and the spending issue and the foreign policy.
It's not usually national security and a healthy economy.
I think that's the last thing it is.
A lot of times it's just plain old political power that they're looking for.
So Biden and the Saudis are not getting along well.
But that will eventually lead to a problem not easily solvable, and it will be a contributing factor.
It already is, is that if the market ever breaks through, and the markets always break through, and the markets will break through, not because what the policy is in these various countries, it'll be because it'll be an inflationary problem.
That is, the value of the dollar is going down, and they'll get to the point where it will be an economic matter.
Prices are going up so much, and the Saudis will rationalize.
Look, our costs are going up, and whatever, so there will be an economic factor, and then the market will rule.
But I don't see how you can look out five or ten years from now and say, well, you know, we'll be back to $2 a gallon, something like that.
The dollar is not going to do that.
For now, it's going to be this bickering.
It's going to be political and a blame game.
And it'll be a big thing coming up on just what's going to come here in the rest of this year in the election.
Yeah, and it's, you know, obviously we're not naive.
We know this happens all the time.
But there certainly is a suggestion we can put on that first clip if you can get that up.
This is from the Human Events Jack Bosoviak.
Breaking the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia confirms Biden attempted to coerce them to postpone oil cuts until after the midterms.
They announced they have rejected his quid pro quo.
Now, essentially, obviously, this does happen.
We're not naive again.
But this is kind of my first thought was, isn't this kind of the thing that got Trump impeached the first time?
He's calling up Ukraine saying, hey, if you do this, we'll do that.
He's obviously trying to use oil prices to manipulate the election.
They know they're in trouble.
If we go to the next clip, we'll see how Saudi Arabia, in a very diplomatic language, basically slapped them back.
They say the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would like to clarify that based on its belief in the importance of dialogue and exchange of views with its allies and partners outside the OPEC plus group regarding the situation in the oil markets, The government of the kingdom clarified through its continuous consultation with the U.S. administration that all economic analyses indicate that postponing the OPEC-Plus decision for a month,
according to what has been suggested, would have had negative economic consequences.
So here they are saying that they were suggested to postpone it for a month, i.e. after the midterms, and they have, again, in diplomatic language, told the Biden administration to go pounce in.
Yeah, it's easy to recognize what the president's trying to do, but it's easy to recognize what the Saudis are doing because they said this is purely economics.
And there might be a tinge of that.
They'll use it as an excuse.
But you know what it reminds me of is there was a certain individual that's in the Congress has a high position that was accused of trading, you know, folks trading, you know, insider trading.
And of course that's Pelosi.
And she had an explanation, just like the Saudis have.
This is just economic policy.
She says, I believe in free enterprise.
I believe in a constitution.
And she really hasn't backed down from that.
Because there's some burgers, she's splitting their group even more so there because some of the group, the old-fashioned Democrat, still has a tinge of progressivism.
And they said, why don't you do something to curtail that?
She won't bring up any potential vote on it.
So, yes, it could be politics, too.
It's not just an economic decision, but hide behind whatever you can.
Yeah, whatever you can.
And, you know, this is Biden who came into office calling Saudi Arabia a pariah state.
And of course, we've been very critical of Saudi policies and their behavior in the region, nevertheless, or certainly for our support for their behavior in the evening.
Nevertheless, you can't call them a pariah state, refuse to meet them, and then kind of tiptoe out there in July saying, hey, can we get some more oil and a little bit of a bind here?
The thing here, I think, Dr. Paul, the bigger picture is that the U.S. is used to giving orders and having them obeyed around the rest of the world.
And they haven't realized, Washington doesn't realize yet that they don't have the same kind of leverage that they used to have.
And ironically, partly that's the case because of all the sanctions on Russia.
They threw everything they could at Russia to try to bring it to its knees.
And in fact, they're doing better economically than the rest of Europe and the United States.
So that means they have less leverage.
The Saudis and the Russians are getting along very well.
They're trading very well.
They have good relations.
In fact, Russia with the entire Middle East has regular relations.
So this whole idea that we're going to tell you to jump and you say how high, it doesn't fly anymore.
And I have one other clip to put on.
This is from a Zero Hedge article about it.
And this is an example of how the U.S. still thinks that it can push the rest of the world around.
The U.S. government, I should say.
So it says, after OPEC on October 5th decided to slash oil output by 2 million barrels a day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Air Force One that it was a mistake.
And she accused the group of, quote, aligning with Russia.
You know, that is something that you can throw that mud.
You can sling that mud at everyone in America who's not in favor of sending $80 trillion to Ukraine.
But you can't say that to Saudi Arabia.
And in fact, I think it just made matters much worse.
Big surprise that things like that happen.
You know, one thing that I found interesting was what's going on with the campaign.
Because, you know, with the inflation statistics out this morning, boy, this is really, really going to come down hard on the Democrats.
The truth is, is if you look at this more objectively, there's a little bit of guilt to spread around there.
You know, there's a few Republicans who blindly vote for every military budget ever.
So they're big spenders, too.
But what the Democrats may be discovering right now, even though they're still going to have one more hearing on January 6th, because that was insurrection and taking over the country and a bunch of lies.
And yet the evidence now is piling up to show that Rajagate, the FBI was more guilty than anything.
And they were in collusion with Hillary.
So anyway, somebody did an analysis, and generally speaking, what happened on where the money was being spent on advertising, the percentage of money being spent on the January 6th issue, very, very low.
And it's really a non-issue.
You know, it's overwhelmingly the issue of inflation.
And that's why they're desperate to do whatever they can to get the Saudi Arabia.
Please, Curtis, speak us up.
We need it.
And of course, the stupidity of it all.
But you can find room for plenty of guilt for the party in power right now for what they did, even with Trump's imperfections.
There were more liberties at the market, work in the marketplace, and there was more energy produced in this country.
And at least he didn't have an obsession with trying to destroy pipelines and being involved.
Not that he wouldn't be involved in some of the politics of Europe, but it is something that's very, to me, very interesting that January 6th, just think of all those hearings.
I guess they believe that the American people are so stupid.
They have a hearing and they call it bipartisan because they have two people who are plants, they're Democrats, and they come along, they put them in chairmanships, and they string it out, and they have all this fanfare.
Germany's Price Crisis00:14:11
And even legally, it's just fake, too.
I mean, if they were serious about a crime that was committed, they'd make some charges, you know.
But I understand they really haven't pursued that.
It's all political stunt.
And release some of the tapes, too.
Yeah, or there you go.
If it were serious, yes.
Exactly.
Well, you talk about FBI corruption.
This isn't on our menu today, but I'm sure you noticed that the FBI offered Christopher Steele a million dollars to corroborate his own report, and he couldn't do it.
So they were trying, like, please, we want this to be true.
We want the dossier to be true.
And obviously it's not.
But here are a couple of things in the big news, and this is how you started today.
If we can turn the next clip on, this is from Yahoo Finance.
Core U.S. inflation rises to 40-year high, securing big Fed hike.
And do the next one, because I was going to ask you a question, Dr. Paul.
This is the same article, a closely watched measure of U.S. consumer prices rose by more than forecast to a 40-year high in September, pushing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even more aggressively to stamp out persistent inflation.
Is that going to work, Dr. Paul?
No.
It won't work because they don't know whether it's total ignorance or that's all that's left for them or whatever.
They think that inflation falls out of the sky.
The devil gave us the inflation or Trump or something like that gave us inflation.
But they also believe, according to liberal Keynesian type of economics, that prices go up because the economy is healthy.
If you have a healthy economy and there's high demand, prices go up, and it's a healthy economy.
That's why they thought, well, we're not having any price inflation.
And for 10 years, they tried to make the price inflation go up because they thought that would be healthy for the economy.
But they're under the belief that the answer to what happens now when you have a recession or inflation to get the prices down, what you have to do is cause a recession because wreck the economy.
Because if you're in a deep deflationary period, you have to lower prices.
But they think they can lower prices with price controls and they can keep doing this and manipulate interest rates, but it always fails.
I saw one thing here, you know, there was the Ukrainians were asking for a 10-year plan.
Remember the old days when the Russians would do, the Soviets would come and say, well, we have to have a five-year plan.
We have to have a five-year plan.
Now they want a 10-year plan, and they need so much money every month, and as if that was going to save their day.
But they literally believe that as an economic policy, that a slow economy is the only thing it could do.
And for them, that is it.
Because what they're saying is, forget it, folks.
There will never be any cut in spending.
The welfare state won't be cut, and the warfare state is not going to be cut.
And so they will continue to do this, and they will tinker with the interest rates.
And even today, the markets were rocky and everything.
You know, before the markets opened, the stocks were up, the dial was up 500 points.
Then it opened.
Oh, this is much worse than we thought.
It went down 1,000 points.
And then the British said, oh, we're not going to raise our interest rates as high as we said they were.
It's going to be much more modest.
The stock market went up a thousand points within minutes.
That reminds me of how the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, several of them lectured me, and they said, Well, yeah, you're right.
This is the way it works.
But as long as we can keep it orderly, so I would say that it's disorderly right now.
Well, the news keeps getting worse, and it almost feels like we're getting close to another housing crisis.
Let's go to the next one.
This is from Baron's insult to injury.
Mortgage rates hit 6.92%, the highest in 20 years.
So we're seeing a real downturn in the housing market, too, Dr. Paul.
Boy, I'll tell you, they will lose control because I keep trying to look for the interest rates that would be more market-oriented.
And, you know, it was the manipulation of those mortgage markets, which was the QE.
The government says, oh, it's going too high.
And they might even do it again.
They'll buy them and keep the rates down because the houses won't be built.
So it's a thing that they will be obsessed with regulations and they believe when that's what they're in is price control, price control of interest rate.
That's their whole philosophy.
That's Keynesianism.
You know, regulation and control of mistakes.
And they do believe that when the Fed makes a mistake and the Fed admits, that they're supposed to iron things out with regulation.
So they believe in inflation of the money supply.
And they believe in involvement in economic planning.
And they believe in regulations to cover their bases.
You know, when there is a problem, you know, if the kids don't have enough money and they're not saving money and it was not working, we have an idea.
It's a perfect idea.
We just give them the money and they'll pay it back after they get a job.
And it's not working out so well.
Good luck with that.
Well, I like charts, and I know you do as well, Dr. Paul.
So let's look at a couple of them.
Here is a chart of the CPI, the price inflation.
I give that to you.
Thank you.
I was too small.
And then you have to go back 40 years to see it at the rate that it is now, and it's almost a vertical line, which is pretty serious stuff.
The next is the price of food, which I don't think is even in the basket.
Is it things that they measure?
It takes it out.
Yeah, the price of food is shot sky high.
The next is the price of rent and housing.
You see that's straight up sky-high, vertical chart.
And now you see real wages on the next one, Dr. Paul.
I think that speaks volumes.
You see real wages just going through the floor.
So I just think those four charts pretty much, we could have just been quiet and shown the charts.
So this says that if you just increase demand, that'll take care of it.
And you increase demand by passing out more money, but all of a sudden, their real wage goes down.
You know, the wage goes down by just printing more money.
And it is a terrible, terrible problem if you were there and trying to bring sanity to the situation because it's taking the medicine that nobody is interested in taking.
Say, yeah, you're right, but let's not do it now.
We'll do that later on.
We'll do it after we're elected.
You know, as soon as we're elected, we're going to do it.
And yet, even after the elections, the new party that's supposed to correct it, they generally don't do it because it's so ingrained.
It isn't ingrained like, and this is why I am probably the last person in the world that would say very much favorable about our president.
But the president didn't cause this mess.
He just made it so much worse and make it harder to deal with.
But it comes from very deep philosophic viewpoints that have been around for a long, long time.
One thing that is the most disappointing to me where the shift was, and the Republicans were responsible for this, and that is it used to be liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, generally believed that tariffs weren't good.
Free trade, and they opened up, and that was one thing that they did.
Let's have more trade with China.
Let's have more time.
And a lot of that worked well.
Look at how things started to work with, instead of free war, free trade with Vietnam and China.
Things perked up.
But then it became competitive and warmongering and all this.
The free trade is virtually dead.
But I do blame the Republican Party for a lot of that.
But the Democrats thought it was a pretty good idea, too.
They go along with it.
And nobody would say, get up, except there was one person recently had suggested that we should change our attitude toward Russia.
She got into a whole problem over that.
But to keep these regulations on there instead of moving toward free trade, that argument's been around for many, many years.
And it was America that was at one time a champion of free trade.
The more you trade it, the founders believed strongly in it.
And I see articles now being written.
That's a fallacy.
That you trade with people, you're less likely to fight with them.
But, you know, we haven't been shooting at the Canadians lately.
Exactly.
Well, let's move on to just one little bit of foreign stuff.
And this, I think, is just sort of up there for irony.
Put on that next clip.
This is the Alliance, the alternative for Germany, AFD Party, is a conservative party in Germany that takes an independent view on foreign policy.
The other parties are pretty much all lumped together.
And they're starting to get some traction in Germany.
Dr. Paul, they're starting to get more popular.
It's a democratic country.
It's a democratic party.
The polls are showing that they're doing well.
So what does the left do?
They call, go back to that one please.
They call for the party to be banned.
That's the democratic thing to do.
If your opponents start doing well in the elections or in the polls, you should call for them to be banned.
And that's exactly what's happening in Germany.
We can put that next one up.
The very appropriately named Dorothea Marx, who's a member of state parliament from the Social Democrat Party, says it's a good time to ban the party.
She says the time is ripe.
She says the next logical thing is a ban procedure.
According to Marx, it would also be possible to ban individual state associations.
AFD's hatred and agitation must no longer be equated with democratic freedom of expression.
So you have to squelch freedom of expression to preserve freedom of expression.
You have to bomb the village to save the village.
The great democracy of Germany wants to only allow one type of political party.
They might say, well, the Americans are doing it.
They ban people.
They cancel people and they kick them out.
And they just disallow them from operating in a marketplace.
So this is nothing new.
When the people in power run into trouble and they're losing support, like the Democrats are right now, there's no argument.
They're losing a lot of support.
Groups like that become more vicious and tougher and meaner and nastier because they're not so much worried about a healthy economy or peace.
That's not our goal.
I think there's an organization called the Ron Paul Liberty Report and the Peace and Prosperity.
But that's not their goal.
Their goal is power.
So what they do is they can show that they can be banned.
But that's exactly the way the Soviet system was held together.
You know, how did they have enough military to make everybody obey?
You know what they had control of, their largesse.
They had control of who got a room to stay in, who got food stamps to live with.
And it was all control of the economy.
And that is what we did.
We had a real taste of what was happening, and we haven't canceled their motives yet.
And that is, of course, under COVID.
The motivated was to, if you dissented from the status quo, you were in big trouble.
This was and is the threat to an authoritarian.
If somebody has the audacity to go public and tell the truth and discover not only that it's true and makes them feel a little guilty, they say, it looks like people like what they're saying.
It looks like they want to hear the truth.
But that is the lion becomes their weapon, and this is why the process continues, and this is why civil liberties are violated.
The whole works.
Freedom is the answer.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, you might wonder, well, why are they surging in the polls?
Why is this party getting so much more popular?
Well, as you move into winter and Germans have to start burning trees and chairs and God knows what to stay warm, let's put up this next clip because it's from the same article.
You wonder why are they getting more popular?
As Germany's entire political leadership, read that again, entire political leadership has moved to slap sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, the Alternative for Germany party has pushed for Germany to reopen the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and repair any damage.
So they are pushing for a solution that would make the lives of the average German easier this winter, and they want to ban them because they're getting popular.
And ironically, in this talk about hypocrisy, just last month, the European Parliament voted to accept a report that called Hungary, quote, no longer a democracy because they didn't like some of the policies.
So here's a country that elects political parties across the spectrum and they have a government in power.
That's not a democracy, but it's certainly okay in a democracy to just ban a party because you don't like them.
Yeah, and Marx, the modern day Marx, made it very clear that AFD hatred and agitation must no longer, she's talking about the enemy, the conservatives and populist type group.
They must no longer be equated with democratic freedom of expression.
Special Word to Ron Paul Followers00:03:53
I mean, how could it be more blunt?
Germany has got problems.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, and put up that final clip.
Again, I'm going to talk about the conference, but I'm going to say a special word to those of you who follow Ron Paul on locals.
And if you're watching this on Rumble right now, you know you can just click right over to Locals and join our Locals page.
You can join for free.
You can also join for paid.
But we are making a very special offer that our locals members are going to receive a special discount to this conference.
I just put it up there.
There's a special code.
So if you're a member of Locals, go check out your Ron Paul Locals.
It's going to be a special discount code for you as our way of saying thank you for joining Ron Paul on Locals.
And we look forward to seeing you next month at the conference.
Dr. Paul?
Very good.
I want to thank our viewers once again for their loyal support.
And I hope to see a lot of you at our coming conference.
But you know, today was an announcement of what was really going on in the pricing department, inflation and deflation, this sort of thing.
And there's a lot of people being hurt by it.
But they keep talking about inflation and who pushed the inflation up, where was it the Saudis or what was it?
Well, prices, in a way, don't go up.
It's the value of the dollar.
So every time you say, inflation is killing us, inflation is killing us, which is true, but you have to know the definition.
Inflation is not because somebody's not producing enough or they're producing too little, but it's because we produced and printed too many dollars and we live beyond our means.
And you have these consequences which are totally predictable, at least that they will come.
The extent to which they come is unknown.
And the people who suffer the most, we can't dictate that.
But when an individual, a family, a company, a state, or a government spends way beyond its means and they cover themselves with debt, believe me, the debt will be paid.
And that's what we're in the process of doing of the debt.
But in addition to that, you have the thing called malinvestment that not only did they get too much debt, but they made a lot of mistakes because interest rates guide individuals on savings and spending and investments and entrepreneurship, all these things.
But if you don't have the market talking about the interest rates, you've ruined the market.
And therefore, you know, so many investments are misappropriated and people don't want to admit that.
And they'd much rather have a Friendly group of people at the Federal Reserve that said, Oh, well, when we're in trouble, lower those interest rates and pumping some money, QE, and all this kind of stuff.
And all it does is make it worse.
So, sound money really is one thing that we will someday have to consider if we really want to live in a free and thriving market.
And there are statistics coming out now.
There was one today showing that we used to always be top in this category, and now we're seventh, and we're slipping.
And not that the other countries are so great, but we're slipping because we believe we could live beyond our mean, and people have overly trusted us.
False illusion that we could manage the economy and we could keep the world peaceful because we had the most powerful military.
But that's coming unraveled, and people have to realize that.
But the answer is not complex.
Getting people to do it is complex.
But the answer is simply resorting to sound money, honesty in government, and believe in property rights and contract rights.
And you want to live in a free country and assume responsibility for it.
Sound Money for Prosperity and Peace00:00:20
And that would be neat.
Not only would it solve our problem, but it would mean that you wouldn't have income taxes and you wouldn't have to put up with all these regulations, all that you have, and there would be more prosperity.
And I'm convinced there would be more peace.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.