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Jan. 11, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
26:49
Poking China: Biden Asks Congress to Approve $1.1 Billion in Weapons for Taiwan

Poking China: Biden Asks Congress to Approve $1.1 Billion in Weapons for Taiwan by Ron Paul Liberty Report

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US Put and Taiwan Tensions 00:14:53
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.
Happy Tuesday, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
I'm doing fine.
Trying to get psyched up for our very important meeting and get together with our supporters coming up pretty soon.
I'm leaving today, hitting the road.
And you're flying American Airlines or United or which one?
I'm flying Kievan Airlines.
That's why you needed an extra day.
Exactly.
It takes you a day and a half for the drive.
Well, more than that, it's 23 hours of driving, so I'm not going to do it solid.
Otherwise, that'd be problematic.
Yeah, I used to love that driving, but I don't as much.
And you're probably in the middle.
I like it.
I like seeing the country.
It's an interesting country.
Okay, we're going to start off today with a subject we've talked a lot about.
I can't believe it.
And it's all about the same theme.
There's a confrontation going on.
And of course, there's military confrontations between our governments and other governments with China and Russia and Ukraine and all this.
But this is a confrontation with the military-industrial complex and how that works and the hawks in Congress.
So the headline today in Politico, Politico of all places, every once in a while something pops up on the progressive side out of memory.
Oh, they're against corporate welfare and all this stuff.
But anyway, the headline on Politico is Biden administration to ask Congress to approve $1.1 billion arm sales to Taiwan.
Taiwan.
Well, these are sales.
I don't think this is, they don't write a check exactly, but I'll tell you what, it's payoff to the corporations, the payoff to the military-industrial complex.
And a lot of times it's export-import bank.
That's something we haven't very often talked about.
But they pay the bills, but we loan them the money.
And it's not, as I recall studying that, there was a lot of not paying back those loans.
So it is.
It's a tax on the people.
And besides, it fits into our next topic, and we'll in a second talk about that.
And as where are the weapons going?
Boy, we must be the most protected country in the world.
But now they're suggesting maybe there's a shortage among all this expenditures.
But the people who seem to be doing quite well, and this is nothing new to our audience, and that is the military-industrial complex.
They are doing quite well.
And it looks like no matter what happens, no matter how dumb the policies are and how extreme it is, no matter how holiday it is, and how much potential danger that they build.
People talk a little bit about that, but that's probably the worst part of all this.
The greatest danger of a war.
So these are arms sales to Taiwan, and I don't imagine China's sort of happy about that.
I don't think they're drinking coffee with the arms inspectors.
So this is this, I don't think for a minute this wouldn't pass because there's going to be a strong coalition.
Even though the Republicans and the Democrats really hate each other, they'll get together.
The approval will come.
We'll probably hear about that within a week or so.
Yeah, let's put up that first clip because we saw it Politico, of course, but it's via NTOWAR.com that we saw today.
Biden to ask Congress to approve $1.1 billion in arms sales for Taiwan.
And there are two things about this, Dr. Paul.
That's why it's like a perfect storm.
Number one, it's all about poking China.
We're going to send more anti-ship, anti-air missiles to Taiwan.
Obviously, those are aimed at China.
That's the whole purpose, is to aim them at China.
So one, to poke China.
We've had delegation after delegation go through, starting with Pelosi's big delegation, going through Taiwan, being increasingly boisterous towards China.
And now we're going to sell them weapons.
So one, poke China, make China our enemy, push China into the arms of Russia, which we've done a good job.
And number two is propping up the military-industrial complex, because this money is not a sale from the United States.
It's a sale from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's all about, and I remember you've talked about this when we were in the congressional office when you opposed these arms sales, because basically you socialize all the costs.
All the R ⁇ D is on the back of the American workers.
All of the bribing, all of the lobbying, everything like that, all the costs of producing these weapons are borne by American citizens, but all the profits are reaped by the corporate entities, the military-industrial complex, the Beltway bandits.
So it's really the worst kind of corporatism.
There's another word for the F-word, but I won't use the F-word on this show, but it is a corporatism.
But when we say, well, you know, we draw up contracts with these companies, and they have to live by these contracts and spend so much money or they can get into trouble.
Yeah, they do that all the time.
And then there's this thing called cost overrun.
I don't know how many weapons systems, it's been an interesting project.
How many times did we build a major weapon system without going over the original agreement and original cost?
They're always overrunning.
Think of the airplanes and submarines and aircraft carriers.
They just never built any of that within the original budget.
And of course, you know, realistic, they also built into it.
They might put into the contract, oh, we'll take care of the cost overruns.
And then they create the inflation and all of a sudden, you know, they adjust it.
It's a racket.
Everybody, I said that.
This is a racket.
Well, let's put up this next one.
And this is a very lively commentator who Xi Jin is a journalist in China who's always very colorful and very to the point.
He makes a great point here.
And this is underneath the announcement, the tweet that we're going to sell $1.1 billion to Taiwan.
Shijin says, when it comes to the Taiwan question, the U.S. president is very much like the sales manager of a big arms dealer.
You could say that not just about Biden, but about his predecessor, etc.
The one thing about this, and I mentioned it earlier, Dr. Paul, is that these congressional delegations go over to Taiwan and become increasingly confrontational.
There was even a member of Congress standing on Taiwanese soil saying, Taiwan is an independent country.
Now, you and I might scoff, say, you can say whatever you want.
You can say, you know, I'm a potato or whatever.
But the fact is that these words have meaning there, as if some foreigner would go to California with a lot of guns and saying that California is Mexico.
But the question is, she may say that, this member of Congress, but what's the end game?
What's the goal?
What is the benefit to the United States of her going there and poking China, irritating China, making China angry by saying that Taiwan is an independent country?
You know, these people are not patriotic.
They are undermining our security for zero benefit.
You know, if we had a visit there which was diplomatic and had nothing to do with this strategy and the potential wars that might evolve, but under a more mild situation and you don't want to say dumb things like that, I don't know why they would be offended by saying, well, maybe the problems you can have could be solved by self-determination.
That means each side can work it out.
And that at least would solve it.
But they come up with this.
And, you know, here it was like they didn't understand what the policy really was, but that's hard to believe.
Maybe one or two at the top level didn't know what it was.
But they had sort of had an agreement that, yes, there would be a two-party system, but we weren't going to go to war over it.
Now it looks like somebody wants to go to war over it.
But they may not know, Dr. Paul, because I remember your famous story about a very, very prominent member of Congress saying to you, you mean we're not on the gold standard anymore?
And I won't say this person's name, but this congressperson is now even higher than she was before.
The other issue about this, Dr. Paul, and let's put on this next clip from Zero Hedge, is the issue of moral hazard.
Because we prop up Taiwan with weapons, we wink-wink, implicitly give them support, we say they're an independent country.
It emboldens them to do things they wouldn't normally do, which in turn threatens to draw us into their fight, which is not our fight.
And here's something that came out on Hedge today.
U.S. stocks sink after Taiwan fires at China drone.
So the Taiwanese Defense Ministry fired at a Chinese drone.
You might say big deal, but they feel emboldened, I think, by this implicit U.S. backing.
And then again, you see, and here's the journalist again, who Xi Jin, let's put this one on if you can, issuing a warning to Taiwan to stop shooting at their drones.
He says, I advise the Taiwan troops not to shoot blindly.
It's better to throw stones.
If you shoot a drone that ordinary people play with, then that's that.
But if you shoot the PLA's drones, you may trigger a war.
So a warning, an escalation, for what real purpose?
We shouldn't be emboldening Taiwan.
We shouldn't be involved at all, but we certainly shouldn't be emboldening them with the implicit idea that we're going to come to your aid because we're not.
We're not going to fight China.
We're not going to go to nuclear war with China over Taiwan.
We should just say it, just like Ukraine was not going to be in NATO.
Just say the obvious.
You know, it was while I was in high school that I first became aware of foreign policy and all because one of our teachers was redrafted.
He had been in World War II, redrafted and sent over to Korea, unfortunately, didn't come back.
But Korea is interesting because I remember the debate.
And I think one of the reasons why I knew what was in the news is I delivered newspapers and they actually had headlines that gave me some information.
Wow, those are the things.
And my dad would listen to the radio.
So I did have, it did get my attention.
But I remember the back and forth discussion.
You know, when MacArthur went in there, he was bold, and he says, you know, things were moving.
They were about to be pushed off the peninsula.
And MacArthur had success, and he was moving along, and he was about to take back all the territory.
And when he did this, they said, well, but people were worried.
They said, what if China gets involved?
Oh, no, they're not going to get involved because we're going to the Yalu River.
I guess what?
We won't cross that and we won't bomb them and all this stuff.
But maybe somebody did drop a bomb.
Maybe there was a false flag.
But who knows?
So all this victory, they were about to, we'll all be home for Christmas.
And it was all a force.
And it was just the beginning of it.
And we lost a lot of people there.
And they're still, I think technically we're still at war there.
I don't know whether the final peace has ever been signed.
But it just seems so foolish.
And now we're doing it again with the Chinese, with Taiwan.
And it seems like The best thing for us, our national security, our finances, and for world peace, and not to have too many of these activities are unpredictable, is for us to just stay neutral and stay out of there.
Don't sell weapons to them, you know.
But what would we do about the military-industrial complex?
They're a powerful force.
They're a force for good, you know, and they will provide the weapons to defend us when the Chinese finally get too close for us.
Well, speaking of the weapons to defend us, Dr. Paul, bad news.
We don't have any more.
Let's put on this next clip.
This was a Wall Street Journal.
It's been written about in other places.
The Ukraine war is depleting U.S. ammunition stockpiles, sparking Pentagon concern.
Now, the thing about this is there are so many angles to this, Dr. Paul, that are interesting.
The first, just in terms of the numbers, well, there was about $40 billion authorized.
I think about 13 of those have been appropriated to be spent on specific weapons for Ukraine.
And what the claim is now that we have sent so much stuff over there that we're actually getting low ourselves.
And on one hand, I mean, you can criticize this on any number of levels.
A, you could say how dumb it is to send so much stuff over there to this war across the other side of the world to the point where we don't have enough.
The other point you can say is this is, is this really some kind of a cry from the military-industrial complex saying we have a chance to get some more money?
Yeah, I remember even when a liberal Democrat was running in 1960, I believe it was, and a Democrat, and he wasn't supposed to be pro-war.
Later on, he became, he was more pro-war than we thought.
Of course, I'm talking about Kennedy.
And his statement at the time, I heard that on the radio so much, is there's a missile gap.
There's a missile gap.
He ran on that constantly, and he totally neutralized the Republicans because he outdid it.
But that's the kind of trickery that is so disgusting in politics, you know, is to demagogue issues and we get involved in wars, we shouldn't be involved, and people die, you know, and money is spent.
And the real harm done, the injury done to the families that you never even hear about, and plus all the consequences of the money spent and taken away from the people through taxation, the inflation that I have, it's endless.
But they never seem to want to seriously talk about changing the policy.
It's the same old thing that we have this moral responsibility.
I saw one statement in there that what the Taiwanese are doing, the Ukrainians are shooting 3,000 missiles a day to stop the Russians.
It's not working that well.
Well, the thing is, even if we take this on face value, Dr. Paul, that everything they say is just very, very accurate, that we've given a ton of weapons to Ukraine, and now we're running low on weapons, and it's affecting our readiness.
Running Low on Weapons 00:06:15
What does that say?
First of all, it says that either the Pentagon is criminally stupid, you know, because if you give away all your toys, all your guns, and you don't have any left and the bad guys come, then you're in trouble.
Or they're traitorous, right?
Because obviously if the U.S. is left undefended, as is claimed, and their job is defending America, well, then that doesn't sound very patriotic to me.
Or, you know, the other thing is really an admission, this is where I would come down on the side of, this is an admission implicitly by the Pentagon and by the people in the military defense industrial complex that there really aren't any threats to the United States.
The job of the military is to protect the United States, continental United States, and if they felt there was really a legitimate threat to our country, they wouldn't have given away all the weapons.
So I think that's the real truth.
They know there's no threat, so there's no downside.
Give all the old ones out.
Let's buy some new ones.
Build a new mansion in McLean.
Everyone's going to be happy except us.
I agree with you.
We don't have an enemy that's about to march in.
But we do have an enemy.
There is a real threat.
It's the people that's running our foreign policy.
And that's not just one person.
I mean, it's both parties and all the corporations, all the nonsense going on.
That is what's threatening the people.
So that's where the real tragedy is.
So, you know, in Afghanistan, they talked about weaponry.
We left a lot in Afghanistan.
And the Taliban has it.
What are they?
The second country now that has in weaponry.
But, you know, the weapons end up either being used against us.
And I kept thinking that they probably are saving up these weapons.
If we're running out, maybe if we offer to buy them back.
That's an idea.
Buy them back from you.
They do that in the inner cities, right?
We'll buy back your guns.
We could do that with Ukraine.
We'll give them a gift card, chilies or something.
You know, send us your missiles back.
I think that's a great idea.
Weapons buyback from Ukraine.
Everyone will be happy.
Well, we're going to move on to our last little talk with Dr. Paul, and this is one a little closer to what you've been talking about.
And you notice this.
This came out from the Daily Bell via Zero.
You haven't seen anything of the Daily Bell in a while.
It's nice to see them.
They used to be a lot more prominent.
But this is about the corporate media respects the science and wages jihad against natural medicine.
I know this is near and dear to your heart.
Yes, and this is systematic.
They know what they're doing.
And you'd think it was overkill.
I even think that occasionally Fauci accidentally says things, you know, oh no, they just quoted him from a different period of time.
Yeah, you know, natural immunity is very, very good.
But anyway, it's known.
To be able to achieve what they did by canceling out the whole concept of natural immunity.
I think, though, the truth is smoldering out there, and I think it's growing.
But this article points out how systematically they advertised, you know, just the stupidity of vitamin D.
Yeah.
And also how important the vaccinations were.
But it just seems like the way the American people are reacting right now, the people are reacting more sensibly.
It's just too bad that they were misled for so long these last several years.
So I think in some ways people are waking up.
But it goes to show though, the very first thing I, words I think came out of your mouth was the military-industrial conflict and profiteering.
There's still, as long as there's profits there, cost overruns and all the lying about the foreign policy and all the play on patriotism.
Oh, you're not patriotic.
You don't even care about the Army.
You keep wanting to send them to war.
Yeah, then they come home alive.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I didn't do medicine for you on the Hill.
That was Norm Singleton.
But I remember you used to host several alternative medicine, natural medicine conferences.
There was a group that I know that Norm worked with that were really pushing this.
And look how they've been pushed underground these last two years.
Let's hope they make a comeback because they do great work.
Right.
And it's so important.
And, you know, maybe a true bankruptcy will help people look for more natural and a lot cheaper things.
But I was even just dumbfounded when I first started school and they had what, the PDR was physician's death reference.
And everybody knew about that.
But I said, do you get those things anymore?
Oh, no.
You know, everything's there.
You get your propaganda real fast, you know, off the computer.
But there's so many.
And I keep thinking, how many drugs are out there, you know, that people are selling.
And that to me is so disturbing because there is the profiteering.
I think there's a lack of social conscience, a lack of, you know, just being decent people the way they're willing to sacrifice people's lives and fortunes for them to make more money at this.
And that's generally the way it's been.
It's a shame.
But I think the only option we have, since we reject the idea that we're going to change things with violence, we want to restrain the violence.
It changed people's minds with ideas.
And there are times when we see some tremendous success.
I mean, I think that's, I've been reading some history about our country starting, and it was ideological.
Boy, were the founders well educated and they didn't have a government school to go to.
Maybe that was the reason they were educated.
But it was ideological, you know, and that to me is important.
So ideas do have consequences.
And if you get one going, unfortunately, if you get a bad one going, it spreads too.
But if you get a good idea going, the saying is, you can't stop it no matter how many times you get canceled on the internet.
2014: The Ideological Origins 00:03:22
Right now, those 20 very well-known people who have been canceled, they will become the heroes of hopefully real soon.
Some of them are already heroes in the group of people who know who they were, and they stood up to it, and they didn't cave in and do what they were trying to pressure them into to capitulate and play the game of the government putting out.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close with a clip, a video clip, and it's somewhat unrelated, but I think it's interesting because going back to the Ukraine-Russia war, there's always this idea being pushed, especially in Washington.
I think it's breaking down now a little bit.
I think the truth is coming through, but that somehow this was an unprovoked war by Russia into Ukraine, unprovoked, out of the blue.
We've argued that it has a lot to do with the 2014 coup.
We're not justifying violence or military action.
We're trying to analyze and understand why things happen.
Well, this next clip is Jen Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General.
The guy is a real bad guy, a real thug.
And here he is explaining that we have been giving weapons and arms and training to Ukraine since 2014, i.e. since the coup backed by the U.S. to overthrow their government.
And so the thing is, if you put yourself in Russia's sues and you see a country next door being armed and trained how to attack you from 14 until 22, obviously you're going to put your antenna up.
And let's listen to Jens say this again.
I'm not justifying anything, trying to understand what happens.
To step up the support for Ukraine.
As you know, NATO allies provide unprecedented level of military support to Ukraine.
Actually, NATO allies and NATO have been there since 2014, trained, equipped, and supported the Ukrainian armed forces.
But of course, since the invasion in February, allies have stepped up significantly.
And we also agreed a comprehensive assistance.
So NATO is just a purely defensive alliance, and this all happened out of the blue.
That is, I think, exhibit A for why NATO should be disbanded.
Well, that's for sure.
And, you know, he dated it.
We date it to 2014 because that was a precipitous action.
It was a consequence.
But to fully understand it, you have to back up a little bit because there were promises and pseudo-promises and inference on how to get the Russians to give up their hold on Eastern Europe.
And of course, they walked away.
And the evidence is pretty strong that the European countries in the United States, Jimmy Baker, I think, was involved in that, saying, hey, we have no interest in putting anything up near your borders.
And it is that distrust that starts, but it's the distrust that never even seeps into probably 90-some percent of American people.
Even the coup, it's hard to convince people that.
And I remember one time I got into trouble by bringing up a little historical thing about how we started the mess in Iran by us getting rid of their elected leader.
Business Collusion and Fascism 00:02:18
Well, I'm just going to close by saying I'm going to be on the road today.
I'll be missing a few days and going up to DC for the conference.
And if you haven't gotten your tickets, you should probably get them.
Very good.
And I will be getting there, but I'm going to have Daniel do all the hard work.
He has to go up there and get it organized.
But I'm looking forward to it because we will see a lot of friends and new people too.
And I'm always anxious to see if we get somebody that is just new into the issue and maybe still in high school and college.
And we always get some, and we always get some people from foreign lands.
You know, we're very open to that.
But I think one of the things that we talked about today that we have to emphasize, and that is the combination of money and force and politics, and that is business people colluding with government.
And it's been around for a long time.
I can remember the very first time I ever heard about this is somebody told me once that it was the businessman that participated in some of the money and equipment flowing to Hitler.
Now, come on, that's over the top.
Do you have evidence of that?
Well, I'm not going to cite any evidence, but that whole thing about business people making money off war, it's been around for a long time.
And sometimes it's separated, and it's just an unmentioned thing that they collude and participate and serve each other's interests.
At other times, though, it gets too close and it becomes very fascistic.
But it's very much the case of corporatism, that is a mixture of corporations bending over, giving up what they believe in, hurting people for the sake of a buck.
And yet, Mises taught that if you get into that category, if you have interventionism and it keeps growing and growing, serving the interests of a few special groups, that it will lead to a system that can be classified as fascism.
Unfortunately, today, the word fascism is being thrown along, thrown around a lot.
And most likely, the people who throw it around the most are probably the ones who are the most fascist.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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