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Nov. 1, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
26:46
Oops They Did It Again: Boeing Massively Overcharges Pentagon For Spare Parts

This is why we can't have nice things. Last week we reported on Raytheon being fined for overcharging and bribery; and this week we learn that Boeing is in on the game as well. Are we getting what we pay for with military spending? Also today: two potentially major wars bubbling under Biden's "leadership." Finally...the Ukraine loan scam.

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Stormy Weather 00:05:50
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, you got here on time.
You came through the thunderstorm.
We have a little bit of a storm out there.
Yeah, it's been so dry these past couple of months.
I'm happy to hear it, even though our listeners may be a little bit annoyed.
I'm happy to hear it.
We have to mow our lawn in the wintertime, you know, we'll get to do that.
Anyway, we sort of have a pause on that and we will manage and do our very best to get our information out to you.
And we want to start off with an article that came out of the Libertarian Institute.
And it has to do with abuse at the Pentagon.
You know, I've always worked for a long time about auditing the Fed.
Then somebody says, don't you know we don't even audit the Pentagon.
So there's a lot of anything secret or big time that the people don't get to look at it.
But it also means the members of Congress don't know about it either.
Only a few will know about it.
But the headline is Boeing overcharge Pentagon for spare plane parts, including SOAP dispensers, soap dispensers, at 8,000% markup.
Wow.
Well, that sounds like a technical, just a technical flaw or something.
But this whole thing is such a monster.
And they come on and they can find the corruption where they lie and cheat and make a lot of money.
But the one point that we may talk a lot about it is the process.
Even if they followed all the regs and did it and got the appropriation that were out in the open, what they're doing is wrong.
We shouldn't even be doing it at all.
All these wars without authority and all with fiat money.
So anyway, but this story broke now.
And it really doesn't surprise me.
We know this stuff goes on.
But hopefully the American people would get disgusted with this.
And I think a few are.
I think people aren't avoiding completely and totally the military industrial complex and are starting to realize that there's a lot of abuse there.
And that's what's going to be necessary if they ever start cutting spending.
But we have to prepare to stay at the stage for when the real cuts will occur and the market will help us there because they're not going to be able to manage a system that's totally out of control with runaway inflation.
Yeah, let's put that first article up.
And again, we're grateful to Kyle and the Libertarian Institute.
We saw this on anti-war.com.
Pretty funny graphic here.
Boeing overcharged, as you say, Dr. Paul, the Pentagon for spare parts.
8,000% markup on soap dispensers.
I want to get one of those.
I wonder what they look like.
I mean, I'd just go down to HEB and buy it for two bucks.
I'm going to save some money.
But let's go into the next piece of this next clip.
And this is about a report from the Pentagon's Inspector General found that Boeing massively overcharged the DOD for spare parts on the C-17 Globemaster, which has been very active lately, bringing stuff over to Israel and the Middle East.
Overcharging included the pricing replacement soap dispensers at 80 times the market value.
Now, I think the reason we wanted to talk about this, Dr. Paul, is not necessarily that this is the smoking gun.
Aha, we got them.
Here's what they're doing.
This is why everything.
I think what makes this attractive is to talk about it as a tip of the iceberg.
If they're going to charge 8,000% for a soap dispenser, you know, this is the old in the 80s.
Remember the $10,000 toilet seat.
If they're going to charge this, then there's a lot of other things below the surface of the water.
And it's just indicative of having this military-industrial complex that doesn't serve the U.S. national interest.
It doesn't serve our needs as a country.
It doesn't protect us.
It serves the people that are well connected, that are making 8,000% on their investments.
Right.
And this is the nature of big government.
So this happens in the most patriotic thing that people accept.
And it's the military.
We have to support the military.
And remember how the votes are shifting a little bit, but some of the votes, it used to be about five or up to maybe ten people would even decide to vote against some of this military expenditure.
But I think there are more of that now because the American people are sending a message that why are you sending all this money to Ukraine when we have hurricanes and floods and all the problems of this country?
And if you had to make a choice, it should be an easy choice there.
But it's a system that was destined to do this.
And now it's out of control.
And I don't know.
There will be a lot of people holding their breath.
What's the new election going to be?
Are the Republicans going to be in charge?
Are the Democrats in charge?
And I hope I'm wrong on my cynical approach.
You know, generally speaking, on the big issues, nothing really changes with an election because the control that they have is at the grassroots, each congressman.
And they can't do it.
And they always told me, you know, that's all right.
You might be doing that.
But if they don't stay in, because they'd be on the verge of, I can become chairman of this and really do some good.
So what do they do?
They have to sell their soul to become chairman.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, another reason we're talking about this today is just last week we talked about Raytheon.
Now put this next one up as a reminder to our viewers.
Just a couple weeks ago, Raytheon was forced to pay more than $950 million to settle foreign bribery and export control frauds.
Defense Industry Scandal 00:15:24
You know, so they had, they overcharged, they bribed foreigners, they were fraudulent in their export control.
I mean, it really does sound like a mafia gang rather than people who are building rockets that we need to protect ourselves.
It's no wonder that our current defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, comes from Raytheon.
You make the big bucks when you're in there, and then you come and you work in government and guide our policy in a way that benefits them.
And then when you're done, you go back and sit in your fancy job again.
You know what is sort of scary?
Raytheon was fine, what, $1 billion?
And I think, well, $1 billion used to be a lot of money.
Now they hardly bleak enough.
Oh, we'll make that up next month's billing.
You'll overcharge.
Yeah, we'll overcharge that much again.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, yeah, this is legal fees that we have to pay to stay in business.
Yeah.
Well, the broader aspect of this, I think, is something that's called the defense death spiral.
My good friend, Chuck Spinney, who I've known for 25 years, he worked closely with Colonel John Boyd, one of the greatest military minds that we've ever produced in the U.S., the father of the F-16, which is the greatest fighter we've ever produced.
Nevertheless, they came up with this idea of a defense death spiral.
I put this next one up because this is why it's so important.
Responsible statecraft, to their credit, they published a piece by Dan Grazier about a week or so ago about the return of the defense death spiral.
Now, here's the basic idea of it, Dr. Paul, which is that, and he starts it out by saying, a basic truth in Washington is that almost every single new weapon system ends up costing significantly more than the one it's replacing.
And we've seen that over and over again.
Now go to the next one.
Now, John Boyd, I just mentioned his friends in the military reform movement during the late Cold War years, warned us about the military-industrial congressional complex 50 years ago.
The small band of Pentagon insiders saw with their own eyes how the political economy created by the financial and political connections between the military elite, the defense industry, and society's ruling class wasted precious resources and produced a series of deeply flawed weapons.
So you get the worst of all worlds.
You get weapons that don't work, that cost many times more than they should cost, and you get far fewer of them.
So it's absolute worst of all worlds.
You know, I want to read a short sentence here in this article, making a point that we've talked about a lot.
Nobody will be surprised, but they closed it up.
There exists a revolving door between the Department of Defense and the weapons makers that receive hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon each year.
And it looks like Secretary Lloyd Austin used to be on the board with Raytheon.
I guess he would have a special relationship there.
Very special.
But anyway, there is.
And the one in the pharmaceutical industry has been recognized for a long time.
But I imagine that happens at everything.
Maybe building roads with highways and medical, and it's incestuous.
You have to take care of your friends.
You know, how can I get re-elected if they don't help me get re-elected so I can do all these good things I do?
Yeah, exactly.
Keep getting elected.
Well, I was very happy to be invited earlier this week to give a briefing to an online seminar called The Prospects of Realism and Restraint after the Elections.
It was about 30 of the top realist and restrainer foreign policy experts, and it was basically a brainstorming session.
And one of the things, obviously, you can't talk about specifically because it was a Chatham House Rules event, but one of the things that most of the people participating, these foreign policy experts participating, pointed out is the key to this is the money issue.
The way to connect, and we've been talking about this till we're blue in the face, literally, the way to connect with the average American is to explain to them that they're getting ripped off.
Now, that's not their words.
That's my words that they were saying.
So that is the key.
That's what we have to convey to people, that we are not getting defense from this money.
And this is just example after example after example of this that we keep talking about.
And somehow if we can connect that, I think we would start having some more realism in our policy.
Well, they do two things.
What they use is, you know, patriotism.
If you don't do it, you're not patriotic.
And also, if you don't do the things necessary for the military-industrial complex to have this, then you're endangering our country.
You know, there's a great deal of danger out there.
So people do go along with that.
And then I bet you there's a lot of people that, because they distribute these jobs throughout the country, there's a lot of people who say, you know, well, yeah, that may be true, but I have a good job, you know, and in the industry.
Well, the thing is, if you care about the actual defense of this country, this defense death spiral should terrify you.
Even people who don't want, who want maybe a tenth of the military spending that we spend should be concerned.
And here's one more quote from the article that's very important.
I think this is the most important aspect of it.
And in a way, it's a tongue-in-cheek comment.
If you can put that next one up.
So left, this is Dan Glazier writing for Responsible Statecraft, left unchecked, the acquisition death spiral's inevitable destination is unilateral disarmament.
Read that again.
Unilateral disarmament.
Norman Augustine, a former DOD official and Lockheed Martin CEO, predicted in 1983 with only a hint of satire that, and I highlight this, by 2024, by 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft.
This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy three and a half days per week, except for the leap year.
Then it will be made available to the Marine Corps for the extra day.
So tongue in cheek, but that's where we're heading where we get one jet for our entire military budget.
It looked like that.
That's the direction for sure.
But the overall and the bigger picture is this all feels the incentive comes from a foreign policy that's deeply flawed.
If you have the policy that we have this obligation, people turn that into a moral responsibility.
You know, we are a powerhouse and we have this responsibility to bring about peace in the world.
And it's just like how they control that is obvious.
I mean, just think of the propaganda that occurred since 2014.
I mean, probably 90% of the American people say, well, that was the year Russia invaded Ukraine.
It had nothing to do with NATO and the history of the area.
So that's a big problem.
That's why we feel very dedicated to doing our best to seeking out the people who are going to level with us, whether it's the finances or whether it's the policy.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, the next one we want to talk about is also in responsible statecraft.
They're doing some good work.
I've got to admit, and this is by Anatole Levin, who's long been an expert in foreign policy, tends toward realism in his view of the foreign policy.
And put that up, you noticed that in Senate Hill this morning, and it's pretty interesting because the title is Biden's quote-unquote leadership is blowing the lid off two wars.
And the subtitle gives it away.
The president promised to contain Gaza and Ukraine, but both conflicts have been a slow burn towards something much bigger.
That's quite a dangerous, dangerous observation.
Yeah, and I can't see in the near future it's going to change because the talk and the rhetoric will change and the people will respond to it.
But, you know, it's so universally accepted by other nations as well and by our government.
And even though the Republicans and Democrats fight it with each other, you know, we're just not going to pick up and leave the Middle East or something like that or even leave Ukraine.
They might do something token just to satisfy the people, but it is ingrained.
Yet, once again, they don't have, where do you get the authority to do this?
And they don't have the authority.
And certainly they don't have the dollars.
So they have to steal money in order to pay these bills.
That's essentially what's been going on is the lying and cheating in international finance.
Take money from some countries and use it against them.
Yeah.
And not only do they have no authority, they do it badly.
That's even worse.
They do a terrible job of it.
And I think this article demonstrates really, I think, why this is an important article and encourage everyone to read it.
It demonstrates the Biden foreign policy and how futile it is.
If you go to the next one, this is essentially what he's saying in the piece.
It's definitely worth reading.
But I'll go to the next one.
So the Biden administration seemingly subscribes, and I highlight this, to a foreign policy doctrine of nurturing wars while attempting to manage them so they remain confined to America's foreign policy interests and do not spill over into wider wars.
And I think, Dr. Paul, a good example of that is when it came out that the U.S. was actually encouraging Israel to go into Lebanon because U.S. policy was regime change in Lebanon, and we thought we could use the Israeli military to foment that regime change.
So that's an important part.
So they think they're being very clever by doing this.
But Levin continues, but such fine calibrations are not easily done.
And that's true.
Also true, he says, war is sloppy and unpredictable.
Though a nation's plans may be well understood by its planners, calibration of what might push the enemy too far and cause a wider war depends equally on your enemy's plans, calibrations, passions, and red lines, all of which are harder to profile or understand.
We sort of can sense these things sometime months before, even years before, because they think they'll be benign and they get away with it and they'll accomplish what they want.
But just think how much effort has gone into stirring up violence between Israel and Iran.
And it's us that's also involved in that, and we participate in it.
So that to me is one of the big, big problems.
It also, maneuvering us with China, there's a lot of that that just isn't necessary, you know, to send war vessels up against their boundaries here just so we're tough, don't mess around with us.
But they firmly believe that we're just on the wrong track.
But the evidence is, is the foreign policy of having these multiple wars, you know, who really benefits?
And we've already talked about who benefits.
Sometimes it's just the military-industrial complex.
Yeah, and Levin doesn't say it by word, but what he says in here, which is very important, is the inability of these planners to see the world through the eyes of their adversaries.
You know, they can't see, like you started out talking about 2014, they can't see why the Russians and many Ukrainians would be upset about us overthrowing their government.
They can't see why the Palestinians would object to being slaughtered.
They can't see these things.
And so that means that they discount the red lines.
We've talked about on the show so many times that Biden's people say, oh, well, Putin says that's a red line, but he doesn't mean it.
And what Anatole Levin is saying in this is so dangerous because we have no idea when they do mean it.
And it could lead to a massive explosion, you know.
Yeah, and it's an effort on our part to counteract those in charge of the big picture, you know, the media, the people do it.
Our universities, how about all the professors that go through school and teach foreign policy and they all spout the same thing.
But you have to go to something private.
Fortunately, there still are places, and we quote the people who write the same stuff, statecraft, they come up with it.
It's available.
So we still have enough freedom to talk about it.
But I think that's what people are getting worried about is that are on our side.
It's getting more dangerous.
It's more difficult to do.
And people are concerned what's going to happen next time.
And everybody just throw out right now they don't do philosophy.
They just do name-calling.
I don't know.
Maybe indirectly that's okay because it's so stupid.
And people will finally quit believing what they're saying.
You know, we certainly don't endorse anyone on this show, but I think that is one area where maybe there's a glimmer of hope with Trump because he talks about, I can deal, I can talk to you.
You know, he had a lot of bluster and all the stuff that he does.
But he doesn't ignore the fact that maybe Kim Jong-un has his own interests.
He went and met him.
And so there's a chance that you have to start.
It doesn't mean you embrace the perspective of your adversary, but you have to try to see the world through their eyes.
It just makes common sense.
Yeah, but the people who want to demagogue you, just talking to them.
We're supposed to talk to people.
I mean, and we should do it if we have an interest in, so to try and understand each other.
But I would think if you're talking about the average person in one country versus the other country, the people, the people aren't screaming and hollering for war.
It's the leaders that stir up the trouble to the point where the people become obsessed with it too.
Well, looks like they're coming, they're coming, and we have to go along with it.
One of the points I made when I made a presentation to this foreign policy group, and I'll be writing it up as an update to RPI subscribers, is it actually happened to happen the day after the 62nd anniversary of the end of the Cuba Missile Crisis.
And it ended, and you put this on Twitter, that's what reminded me of it.
It ended because Khrushchev and Kennedy talked to each other and brought us back from the brink.
You know, it just demonstrated this is possible.
Yeah, that shouldn't be a negative.
Yeah.
Just talking to it.
They turned that into a negative.
Well, I want to do one more quote from this before we leave and skip that one and go to the next one.
The Biden administration's policy.
If you can find that, I know I've got jumping around up there.
The Biden administration's policy of calibrating how far you can nurture a war before pushing it over the precipice of escalation has gone badly and placed the U.S. on the edge of two wider wars.
Demonstrating Peace Possible 00:03:58
If Biden is the leader of the world, then he has recklessly and dangerously mismanaged it.
And I would put a couple of exclamation points after that.
Yeah, and then I go and say, do you think Biden was the one that sat down and wrote the plans?
Probably not.
He's too busy biting babies.
Did you see that yesterday?
Wasn't that sick?
He was biting three or four kids.
That's weird.
I was going to put it up, but I didn't want to talk about it.
It's just so weird.
It's weird.
Anyway, next topic, our last one, because it's in the same kind of scheme of things, a cockamame idea.
We've talked about it before, but it's moving forward.
Put this next one on.
The G7 to seize $50 billion in Russian sovereign proceeds for Ukraine.
If we can put that up.
Now, this is a blog, an anti-empire blog by Marko Marjanovich.
Worth checking out, that anti-empire blog.
Some good insights here.
But just in a nutshell, you know, we've given Ukraine how many hundreds of billions, and they're still losing.
They're losing actually very fast.
So the latest scheme is, you know, they seized Russia's 300 billion of Russian assets.
And so they want to use that interest to give money to Ukraine.
But they can't just directly hand it over.
So they come up with this cockamame scheme to repeat myself, whereas we will use the interest on this money we hold as collateral for a loan we're going to give you.
It's probably never been that creative before.
In other words, they stole the money.
They had justified it by falsifying the real cause of the Ukrainian war.
But there's a short paragraph that I want to read on this to tell about the sentiment here.
Not only is Russia out of half of its reserves, it took 15 years ago of sacrifice and austerity to build up and that it could use solely to use right now, but the West gets a 300 billion dollar war chest to fund Anti-russian activities for the next century for free, courtesy of Vladimir 5d judo master.
So what?
What you know is it's just utterly amazing that how they can make me like that and I said, well uh, you know, uh isn't, isn't state capitalism?
Just wonderful, this is, this is state capitalism.
Oh yeah, they're dealing in big money, but it's uh, it's run by the state and uh has nothing to do with uh, real free markets.
And also, the idea that Ukraine is going to pay back to Sloan is absurd, you know, and we've, the U.s is putting in 20 billion out of the total 50 billion the Europeans are putting in the rest.
You know what they've accomplished.
Now, if this week they had a vote in the Congress uh, for even 10 billion or 5 billion, there would be some resistance to it.
But this is, this is complicated and uh oh well, if we're taking it from the Russians, that's okay, you know.
So this uh, this is this, is a sneakier way of doing it and there'll be less uh, less people talking about it, and it won't change anything on the ground in the battlefield, which is going badly for the Ukrainians, but Lindsay Graham doesn't care.
Fight to the last Ukrainian.
So anyway, i'm going to close out, Dr Paul Uh, and thank everyone who's watched the show today and will watch it later on.
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Uh, we have to spread the message of peace, because we know that neither of the major parties are with us on this.
Very good, you know, we talked a lot about foreign policy day, how it's financed and the corruption that develops from it, and uh how, how?
There's this, this control that they place over the American people.
But the one thing that I want to point out it's, um, you know, it's a corruption that develops from the overall policy.
If we have non-interventionism, all this stuff just disappears.
You know, they say oh, you mean, you're supposed to vote on this and you're not supposed to lie to the people.
So that's, that's the problem, and And we're going to continue to do exactly what we do: find out the best of our ability to find out what's really going on.
And for the most part, non-intervention is foreign policy and non-intervention on our lives is so much better.
I think it's always a shame that we don't do a better job of convincing the American people to understand exactly what's happening.
But one thing for sure: more and more people are waking up and they're starting to realize enough is enough, and we have to reverse this trend.
And I think that's why so many people are disgruntled in this campaign.
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