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Jan. 11, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
34:07
Scam Alert! Ukraine Demands $750 Billion...For 'Reconstruction'!

As Ukraine continues to lose ground in the east, its leaders are inexplicably demanding three-quarters of a trillion dollars to "reconstruct" areas controlled by Russia. Once widely considered the most corrupt country in Europe, Western leaders have already dumped in billions with zero oversight. Will they keep writing checks? Also today, Saudis laugh at Biden's request for more oil. And...JP Morgan warns of $380/barrel oil.

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Ukraine's Sovereignty Struggle 00:12:27
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 to see you, Dr. Bolt.
Did you have a nice July 4th?
Very quiet.
I didn't even hear much noise.
But we were okay.
Large family, but they were scattered around not only in the States, but even out of the States.
Everybody's traveling.
They have more courage than I have.
I like to stay home when everybody else is out on the highway.
But anyway, I had a chance to try to get an article or two that we could talk about or find out what's going on in the world.
And guess what?
I think about the same old stuff going on.
There is a war going on, but now it must be slowing up because now they're talking about rebuilding.
There's been a lot of killing and bombing, and they are looking for some funds.
But, you know, I keep kidding, but it's true.
You might mention to me, you know, Ukraine is looking for $500 billion, and then they come in and over the next day or two they have more.
Tell me which ones are which.
Are these all new ones?
And of course, there are some repetition when you read about it, but there's some new ones too.
Now there's a new gimmick right here.
The Ukrainians say they need $750 billion to recover from the war.
So is the war over?
Did they have a peace treaty?
Was there a declaration of war?
Were we involved in this war?
Did anybody die in this war?
But they evidently said, you know, we want to wind this war down, so we need a couple bucks.
We need a couple bucks for rebuilding it and get back and be participants in the global economy.
So they're looking for this $750 billion.
But, you know, I guess they thought maybe we didn't have it in the bank, which we never do.
So they weren't going to just ask for a new appropriation, new inflation.
But they found a little thing that they could do.
Because during this war, there was a lot of confiscation of property.
The Russians' property.
But every time we say, well, the Ukrainians did it, the Ukrainians couldn't have lifted a rifle hardly without the support of NATO.
So I keep telling myself, this is a NATO war.
This is not a real war between Ukraine and Russia.
And NATO is, you know, who.
But they want the money.
But this can be pretty tricky because the things that were confiscated from the Russian rich people isn't exactly well-earned money.
But anyway, I think the American people might just go along with it.
Yeah, I don't want a tax.
And we probably cause.
I used to hear this after the Middle Eastern wars.
Yeah, Ron, you were right.
We shouldn't have been there.
But after causing all this trouble, don't we have the moral obligation to rebuild it?
You hear this endlessly.
Yeah, the people who did it, they should rebuild it.
Go to the people that demanded that we have war.
And it's not the average American that did it.
But anyway, if they do this, this will not help the relationship with Russia, obviously, because they see this money as being taken illegally and being used.
And not that we can get relationships much worse, because that is the goal of Biden and the neocons.
They want this little old war to continue.
They don't want to get it out of hand, but they just have to have a war going to justify more of their profiteering from the war industry and the weapons industry.
So the big question is, will they get this?
And what about the timing of this?
Do you think there's been a pretty thorough assessment made on how much damage was done and what $750 billion will do?
And I've been conditioned to be rather cynical of all this because I always assume, well, the money never goes to what they tell you it's going to do.
It's always, well, we're going to feed the people who are hungry over there now, and it's justified because they're not guilty of the crimes.
But I don't see anything good coming of this, and I don't think the perpetual war and fighting in that region of the world is over yet.
Let's put up that first photo because here's the AP piece.
You can see Zelensky there.
If we get that first screen, there we go.
Ukraine lays out $750 billion recovery plan for post-war future.
And here's Zelensky in his dramatic presence at the Swiss meeting of potential donors for his country.
You know, Zelensky reminds me of a card shark, Dr. Paul.
And everyone at the table are these dopey European and American leaders.
And no matter what they do, he keeps taking their money and they keep putting it down on the table because they don't realize they're being had.
They're a little bit slow.
So in a way, I guess Zelensky gets a little bit of credit.
He knows how to steal money.
But it's just so bizarre, the chutzpah of this whole thing.
They've just lost completely the Luhansk province.
It's gone.
It's in Russia's hands, and there's very little chance of them getting anything back with the capture of Lushansk, which is a sister city of several Donetsk.
That's gone.
The Donetsk province is about to be gone.
The troops of the Russian troops, whatever you think, oh, this is reality on the ground, are about to take Slavyansk.
That's coming next in Kramatorsk.
So basically, you're in the middle of losing half of your country, and you're talking to, you're saying, I need almost a trillion dollars to reconstruct our country after the war.
Well, you're losing the war.
How is this possible?
It's just amazing that they can do it.
But Zelensky has a way with words, as all card sharps do.
Let's put this next quote up because this is how Zelensky knows how to talk the language of the dopey Western leaders.
Here he is, quote, the reconstruction of Ukraine is not a local project, is not a project of one nation, but a common task of the entire democratic world.
All countries, all countries who can say they are civilized.
Restoring Ukraine means restoring the principles of life, restoring the space of life, restoring everything that makes humans humans.
And make that check out to Vladimir Zelensky, right?
It's just amazing.
I wonder if he has a list of these Democratic countries that must pay.
Maybe.
Maybe Zelensky could just sit down there and write some bills and please send some money.
But it's almost like he wants to change the tradition.
Losers don't gain.
Losers have to pay.
In this case, he wants to end up with money in the bank after he rebuilds the country.
But, you know, under the conditions of the mess that we have and the psychological things that go on in the world, it's a collective system.
People don't think of individual sovereignty.
But you know, this whole thing after the Cold War ended, because it was incrementalism.
There were some countries in Eastern Europe that I thought, wow, they've been under oppression by the communists and they're going to be independent.
But before you knew it, they were involved in agitating and believing the stories.
Well, the Soviet system will rise again.
And the heck with all this end of the Cold War.
We can't trust them.
So they're back.
I was really disappointed.
The recovery did last a little bit longer, but I guess it's the nature of human action that people do get a little bit hungry and they slip back into these habits.
But I think it's the basic motivation and the principles of globalism and lack of sovereignty.
Not only sovereignty in the United States.
I'm talking about sovereignty of us people.
Individual sovereignty.
It's their life.
You know, this sort of thing.
Because that doesn't exist.
It's always up the stepladder.
The individuals, the community, the state, the counties, the federal government, the IMF, the World Bank.
If that doesn't get reversed, I think these perpetual wars are not going to go away.
And you know this Reconstruction, this is going to go to special interests.
It probably won't even be a single road built.
We know that from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, that the whole thing is a scam.
And we already know this here, and I don't think I have a clip on this, but I was just reading down on the AP article.
And this is a prime example of how these things work.
Quote, environmental groups want to help Ukraine build back better.
Lobby groups, Solar Power Europe and Wind Europe, together with their Ukrainian power counterparts, urged Ukraine to set a target of producing at least 40% of electricity with renewable sources by 2030.
So they're coming in there with an agenda of what they want, which is to go to this alternative sources that served us so well here in Texas, right?
But you have millions of those.
They say, well, how can they do this?
How can they get away with this?
How is it possible, these preposterous lies, the idea that you're reconstructing your country as you're losing a war?
How are people still believing it?
Well, this is a great article.
Let's put this next one up if you can.
This is a great article, believe it or not, of all places in Vox, which is mostly garbage.
But Jonathan Goya wrote a great piece, which I highly recommend.
I'll try to put a link in here, but I'm sure you can Google it.
Inside Ukraine's lobbying blitz in Washington.
And here's a little secret, Dr. Paul, that you know and I know, and this is how foreign policy is made in Washington.
You hire a ton of lobbyists and you have them cover the entire hill, except for Ron Paul's office, where it's just a waste of money.
And that's how you get things done.
And this is exactly what's happening.
It's money laundering because the U.S. commits billions of dollars to Ukraine and they hire lobbyists to lobby for more billions.
And so put up that next one because here is just a slight example.
If you read this article, you'll see everything you need to see about how things work and why it's so corrupt and why they believe such absurd lies.
I'll just do the beginning of this from the author.
Ukraine has unleashed an incredible influence campaign in Washington.
There's a lag to the filing of lobbying disclosures, but even in the lead up to the war last year, Ukraine's lobbyists made more than 10,000 contacts with Congress, think tanks, and journalists.
That's higher than the well-funded lobbyists of Saudi Arabia and experts on foreign lobbying told Vox they expect this year's number will grow much higher.
And here's the author who was writing about attending one of these fancy things.
And what they do, they get all of these influential people together and they give them very fancy meals and make a presentation, a dog and pony show.
So here's the author.
This spring I've been invited to an elegant dinner with a parliamentary delegation and morning briefings, no breakfast, just coffee, at think tanks with Ukraine's chief negotiator with Russia.
Foreign policy reporters in D.C. have been inundated with requests.
A journalist from another outlet who asked for anonymity, but to be blunt, concurred, quote, and this is key, it's been a non-stop cycle of Ukrainian visitors in Washington, they told me, and think tanks have basically become lobbyists, but with a non-profit status.
That's why we're sending all this money over there.
Saudis And The Situation 00:06:43
One day they're going to run out, but not this week.
They'll keep printing and people are still going to take it.
But the seeds have been sown and it's going to eventually end up in a calamity, which we're approaching.
One other item I want to talk about here was about Biden, and we talk about who really has been the loser in all this.
I think Biden might turn out to be the biggest loser.
Because he's over there now.
You can't believe he is not aware that his policies are disastrous for producing oil and causing prices to go up.
But in order to maintain a good relationship for the radical environmentalists, he's not going to change.
And somewhere he has a belief or he doesn't have a belief.
But now he knows that the biggest problem with the American people right now is the price inflation, the prices of food, the prices of gasoline.
That is number one, top of the heap.
And he knows that he has to pander a little bit.
So he says, oh, I'm all looking at us.
I'm going to do this.
So what does he decide to do?
He decides to talk to the Saudis.
He takes his hand off there and say, please, please, please help us out.
And at the same time, there's so many other things that could be done.
But there he goes over there.
And the one thing that has developed here in the last couple years, and Biden's going to get credit for this, and that won't upset me at all.
He's going to finally get credit for really destroying the remnant of confidence in the government.
There's less confidence in our government than there probably ever, you know, and it keeps going down.
And this is good.
It's a healthy situation.
But the way I figure, we're not in partisan politics.
I would say, well, what can we do?
And I just fall back and say, well, we don't believe in the guns.
We don't believe that we're going to invade somebody and get rid of the people.
But we have to present the case for the alternative.
This one's coming to an end.
And if you don't want to steal the oil and steal the money and get involved in all these wars and that kind of stuff, the only thing that we could do is work on the whole thing about how markets work and individual liberty work.
You know, conditions weren't exactly great when the founders had to put it together and challenge the world with becoming a much freer nation than ever before.
But right now, we need something equivalent to that.
And there's a few good guys out there, the Mises Institute and a few others like that.
The process is working, but I think that's the biggest challenge we have: is how is it going to be replaced?
Because this is not going to last.
This monetary system is not going to last, and we better be prepared.
But it's going to be, I narrow it down to have a definition for the unit of account.
It's no more complicated than that.
You can't do this.
And it was the undermining of the unit of account that all started in 1913.
And you combine it with an income tax that drove us from a nation that recognized civil liberties and with imperfections has gotten to the point where now we have to face up to what is necessary.
And to me, it's an intellectual fight.
Yeah, well, the Saudi thing is interesting.
And we can actually skip ahead to the third one where it talks about the Saudis because if we can do that.
So here's the whole situation.
So candidate Biden basically kicked the Saudis in the teeth.
He said, we are going to treat Saudi Arabia like a pariah state.
And there probably are some pretty good reasons to feel that way about the Saudis when you look at Yemen and when you look at them killing journalists or whatever, because we never mistreat our journalists ever, right?
So they kick the Saudis in the teeth.
Then they go ahead and do all the sanctions on Russia, which destroys the markets and destroys oil prices, at least from our perspective.
And then they basically go back to the Saudis and say, hey, we want you to, we're America.
You better do what we say.
And they say, well, the rules of the game have changed a little bit now.
A, the Russians never kicked us in the teeth like you did.
B, we're making a ton more money now that you messed everything up with the sanctions.
And now, and we're also taking rubles, what have you, wand, whatever, for our oil.
And now you basically want us to back off.
This is a pretty good gig that we've got going with the Russians now.
They're not hassling us.
We're making good money.
You want us to turn our backs on all of that just because you say jump, we should say how high.
And I think that's in a nutshell what's happening to the world.
Yeah, and it is obviously contributing to the chaos.
The people who want chaos, they're having their way.
But this whole effort, and it's been a bipartisan effort to believe in protectionism and sanctions, which has been very, very destructive.
And it's still going on.
And, you know, it's certainly the big battle with the Russians.
And the Russians are challenging us on much of this because they've been able to get around it.
We say, well, we're not going to buy any of your oil.
Okay, we'll sell it to the Chinese.
So it's a system of interference.
It's exactly the opposite of what free trade and free decisions are made in a peaceful society where people act quite differently.
And so this should surprise no one of what's going on, which is sort of sad because that means if it didn't surprise a lot of people, why didn't they prevent it?
And I think the short-term dollar-driven society probably is the main reason why they're not interested in the right answer.
Well, we'll do, yeah, you're probably right, but we right now we need sanctions and we need to crack down.
We need to do this and we need to support Ukrainians.
We need to be in NATO.
We need to strengthen NATO.
And yeah, I know we're broke, but we need to do it now.
Next year, we'll change our tone.
Boosting Production Simplifies Solutions 00:06:14
Yeah.
Well, we want to talk about one thing that you and I both saw this morning, and that's a very, very wealthy oil.
He's a billionaire.
He owns a ton of gas stations.
And he challenged, because, you know, Biden over the weekend said, listen up, you guys who own these gas stations, you better start charging less money, or we're going to really come and get you.
And he stepped up and said, you know, he is missing the point.
The point is not what we're charging because we're making the same margins we basically always made and our costs are going up.
You need to pump more oil.
And I was thinking, it sounds like he's probably on the right track.
Is he right?
Well, I think he's half right, but he's reflecting the sort of the conservative alternative to a lot more mischief.
So if it's a Biden issue that you're dealing with, yes, he resents the Biden policy and he would change things like that.
But he simplifies it, which is okay.
He simplifies it by saying, well, what we have to do is boost production.
And that is true.
If you boost production, prices come down.
But that is still what so many of them do.
They steer away from the real cause.
This is part of it that has effect on prices.
But the real cause of inflation in all of prices and what we're facing today is a monetary policy.
It's a monetary system that we have.
It's the fact that we run out deficits.
So deficits aren't inflation, but inflation or the deficits that motivate the governments and the politicians to go along, run the printing presses.
But it comes from a strong philosophic belief still that it's part of the philosophy of the Phillips curve.
They say, you know, if you have a good, healthy economy, and usually by inflation, prices tend to go up, and, you know, there's a temporary benefit from this.
Maybe prices go up and the economy slows down.
So what they want to do, though, is say that the prices, if we bring on their belief is that, well, we finally get to the point.
So what have they been talking about for months now?
When are you guys going to raise the interest rates?
What we need is a recession, because a recession is a weak economy, and a weak economy will lower prices, which is sort of true.
But that's the painful way to do it.
You don't solve the problem by bringing, in a free market, you never deliberately cause a recession.
Because they say if prices go down, that's deflation, which is bad, which in the business cycle that can happen.
But they claim that, but if you have a healthy economy, you actually have prices going down.
But that's not deflationary.
It's not the shrinkage of the money supply.
It's the increase of productivity, which he likes.
The billionaire likes that.
But if you don't bring into the whole principle of the monetary policy, yes, it could help, but people aren't quite willing.
When's Biden going to all of a sudden change his mind?
Yeah, oh, that's an increase.
We made too many mistakes about pipelines and drilling and pricing and all this stuff.
So we're going to change our mind.
They're not going to do that.
So they need to think a little bit more about monetary policy.
Well, here's an eye-opener that speaking of oil, and if we can put that next one on from Yahoo Finance, this is pretty disturbing.
J.P. Morgan warns that oil prices could surge 240% as Russia slashes output in response to Western sanctions.
And the Europeans are talking about putting a price cap, a G7 price cap on how much Moscow can sell its oil for or attempting to do that.
And so J.P. Morgan is noting that Moscow could retaliate by reducing its production of oil by as many as 5 million barrels a day without causing excessive damage to its economy.
J.P. Morgan says they worry if that happens, you're going to see a quote stratospheric $380 a barrel for oil.
What do you think about that?
Well, what I think is scary, could happen, but it's sort of the argument I was making before we had this current price inflation going on because, you know, I think it was 2012, they started this theory, where they say, you know, what's needed is we need inflation because inflation is good for the economy and it reflects a healthy economy.
So they did that for 10 years, but we needed prices going up at 2%, which is wrong, morally wrong, it's stupid.
But they did it because the conditions were such that productivity was keeping up and keeping the prices.
So they were all for that.
So that's what they're doing now.
They're saying that if we have more production, that's going to solve all the problems.
But it doesn't work that way if the spending continues and the printing of the money continues.
So it's going to continue that way.
And production is important, but you'll get production in a free market.
But still, I'm back to the old thing.
You need a definition of the unit of account or you will have this economic system and this globalism exactly where we are because it invites the corruption.
It invites the profiteering.
It invites the counterfeiters.
The whole works.
So it's a basically dishonest system.
And it encourages, and the people who know how to cheat and lie.
I mean, Washington is a den of liars.
And the best liars, sometimes they're the ones who get elected.
Yeah.
Germany's Dilemma 00:03:13
Well, the thing is, and this is going to go down in history as one of the worst self-inflicted wounds I think ever.
We thought COVID was bad, where they killed the economy over a virus.
This is just as bad.
You just wonder how dumb these people are.
Skip over that next clip and go to the Bloomberg clip.
I'm just going to, I'm going to basically close out, Dr. Paul, but I did want to bring this up because there are people in Germany that understand this.
This used to be the powerhouse of Europe.
Germany's union head warns of collapse of entire industries.
And this is because the price of Russian natural gas has skyrocketed because of sanctions.
And let's do that next clip because here's what they're talking about.
I mean, this is the end of Germany.
He said, because of gas bottlenecks, entire industries are in danger of permanently collapsing.
Aluminum, gas, the chemical industry.
Such a collapse would have massive consequences for the entire economy and jobs in Germany.
And history shows when, well, anyway, it's unbelievable what they're doing, Dr. Paul.
And I will just, my last, if we can put up that last clip, my last thing will be, I hope everyone had a great weekend.
It's time to think again about what we're going to do in September.
And we would suggest that you might want to come to the Ron Paul Institute's conference if you can put up that clip, Anatomy of a Police State.
In the month of July, we're giving you an early bird special.
We haven't done that in a few years, an early bird special to get you to buy your tickets early.
We're going to have a great conference.
We've got great speakers.
I'm going to have actually our first speaker on the show this week to introduce you to this person who many of you will know.
It's going to be very exciting.
The other thing I want to mention, you can take that down.
Thank you for having it up.
And I will be sending this out to our subscribers, RPI subscribers, but we're again this year going to have the scholars seminar.
And this is for young people who are, or not so young people, who are upper division undergrad or graduate students that are interested in foreign policy and the economic policy, things we talk about.
It's a half-day seminar the day before the conference.
We pick a very select small group for an intense kind of half-day of foreign policy boot camp with some great lecturers.
I will have a link on RonPaulInstitute.org website for applications.
We do this quickly.
And part of it's a test, but we put out the applications quickly.
They're short, they're easy to fill out.
We do offer scholarships to the students that are accepted and their rooms while they're here and free admission to the conference.
So it's a great deal for a half-day of good lectures and also meeting great people.
Again, the link is on RPI right now to the application.
I'm going to write a little write-up and send it around to everyone who has subscribed to Ron Paul Institute for updates.
But we want to push this.
We want to get those applications in.
And it's going to be a great time.
Very good.
You know, Daniel, I want to follow up on your description.
It wasn't very friendly towards productivity.
What was happening in Germany?
If we keep doing it, it's going to deteriorate.
Major Problem Ahead 00:05:28
It's going to be a major, major problem.
And I certainly believe that because those are predictable events.
But it still drives me back to you can't expect anything else if you don't have a definition of the most important thing that is used in every single transaction.
Even worldwide, even under today's conditions, it's the one half of every transaction is the unit of account, the money.
And so it's pretty important.
So if you don't even know what it is, one time I was talking about monetary policy with a Federal Reserve Board chairman, and I think it might have even been a greenspan.
And I asked him to define something about monetary policy.
Oh, well, we can't define it.
I said, how can you run all this and you can't even define what a dollar is?
It's sort of like some people can't even define what a woman is, you know.
So, but anyway, without a definition of a unit of account, if you don't have something to rule value and be used, something that is flexible enough but stable enough where people can agree upon it, you have chaos.
And this is what Daniel was describing, the chaos that occurs in the economy like this.
But what if an engineer, what if a builder, an architect had something, every day they measured something, you know, the measuring stick changed size.
It would be chaos and it wouldn't work and eventually the whole thing would fall apart.
And that, of course, seems oversimplistic, but that's really what's happening.
It just doesn't happen in one day or one week.
It might take a long time because some of the benefits linger for a long period of time.
And the dollar has been useful over the many decades, but it's getting to the point where the flexibility, even when it's strong and weak, it's the fact that it's not stable.
And then you have the setting of prices of all goods and services.
And that causes even more chaos.
Earlier, Daniel mentioned the individual that said that he was predicting J.P. Morgan, I think, that oil could go to $380 a barrel.
And I think it could.
But I think what that is signaling is if it gets to 380, it's going to get to 1,000.
Just like I always said, that if we ever get to that 2% of price inflation, watch out.
You better look quickly because it won't last long.
And how many people can remember how long the government regulated interest rates, the overnight rates, hung around 1%, 2%, but they were around 2%.
And it lasted in a flash, and now what are interest rates?
They're moving up, and they're going to move up.
So this is the whole thing, is they can do all the planning.
They can have the best minds working these calculators and computers and saying, if we do ABC, we're going to get ABC results.
And this is how you have a sound economy.
And 99% of the students in the last 50 years, especially since the Depression, that have gone through any college have been taught Keynesian economics, which is convincing people, and the economists and the politicians, that calculations can be made.
The big breakthrough with Austrian economics is that Mises came up and he says, no, you have to remember about human action.
This is a human action thing.
People aren't driven by looking at somebody's computer program and say, oh, I'm supposed to take my money and do this.
No, and that's the reason it always fails.
The economics that are dependent on computers and calculations and forgetting about human actions and subjective theory of value.
It can't work.
And that is our real challenge.
The information is available.
You know, it's been available for more than 100 years.
I mean, there was a great introduction to free markets with Adam Smith.
So the information is there.
It's just that it's so seductive and so inviting to get a free lunch by too many people that they say, well, if we do this and borrow a little money here or print a little money here, it won't hurt.
And it doesn't at the beginning until they become addicted.
We're addicted to this system, and that's why it's going to get much worse because people are not willing to take the treatment necessary.
Because quite frankly, to change over from this addiction to endless spending and deficits and interference and special interest government, it's not going to be well received.
But it's going to happen.
Either we're going to do it deliberately, which is not, they're not going to do it, or it's going to happen just because it's the spontaneous expectation of a system that is run the way this one is without a unit of account either in the financial system or in the moral relationships, because we have a financial and a moral bankruptcy in this country that has to be addressed.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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