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Jan. 9, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:31
California Burns As Biden Ships More Money To...Ukraine!

The utter incompetence of the political class is on display as Los Angeles and California leadership watch the area burn to the ground. And the fire hydrants have no water in them. But...there's still money for Ukraine! Also today, Trump gets it right on the Russia/Ukraine war.

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Time Text
Political Fires Burning 00:10:49
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Ready to put out a fire?
Yeah, we need to.
That's what I'm saying.
You know, I was thinking about all that burning out there.
Terrible.
What's this saying?
How does it go?
Fire, fire, pants on fire.
Liar, liar, pants on fire, yeah.
But they're talking about real fires, but there's so many political fires and the false accusations.
Any though, just this whole story, we want to talk about that because it introduces so many bad things that happen coming from the radical left, you know, the authoritarians.
And that is something that I have to look, you know, with difficulty finding a good thing to say.
But once again, a few more people got awakened over this when they start to hear about how the authoritarians, and it's amazing that I wonder if anybody's left California yet.
I would think moving out wouldn't matter.
But what a shame.
So when you say, well, how can you stop a fire?
Probably lightning started this fire.
It had nothing to do with the politicians and all.
But it turns out the politicians were involved.
If there was a spark, they made sure it was burned down the whole city.
And it's ongoing.
It's just unbelievable.
But maybe it will wake up some people with what we really want to dwell on, and that you understand so well, is the mismanagement of the city.
Of course, there's a lot of mismanage of the cities.
The left runs cities.
The radical left, they're the ones who ruin the cities.
And if you look at the election map, you can see the blue and the red distinctively, seeing that the more blue you have running cities and states, the worse the conditions are.
Yes, I do point out that more people wake up, but I often wonder, why are they so asleep to begin with?
That's what I'd like to do, is try to prevent people going to sleep and buying into all the lies and innuendos and promises of the politicians because it's a failed system.
And it's been around all my life.
I was, you know, born in the 30s, and we had Roosevelt come in, and I can remember, I was a young age when Roosevelt died, because I was old enough to remember, you know, that's the only president we've ever had.
He'd been president a long time.
But right now, I think there should be some reassessment, but really it's a tragedy.
And once again, I think we can make the case that as bad as it was and more, you know, nature may play the role in it, the winds and all this sort of thing.
But let me tell you, you can't have a disaster like that without a lot of guilt and responsibility placed on the bureaucrats who were running the city.
One thing is, whether it's floods or whatever, you'll find the government was participating in the creation of it.
And one pet peeve of mine has always been the flood insurance.
Oh, we have to pay for their floods.
Yeah, nature's just flooding them up.
But they only went there because the people who lived in the desert had to pay for the flood insurance and guaranteed that they could get insurance at government expense.
So, yes, the fault lies with deeply flawed ideas about what the people should be involved in when they're running a city.
Maybe they ought to let the people decide what they want for their city rather than the bureaucrats and the special interests.
Yeah, it's really sad.
I mean, it's sort of a sad punctuation mark on California's demise.
I grew up in California, spent my first 27 years of my life there in Southern California.
So it's very sad.
But it's people that look at California now, especially the cities, as you point out, they may forget that California was once very libertarian, especially Orange County.
And I was just remembering some of the representatives we had that were libertarian-leaning.
Dana Rohrbacher, Ed Royce had libertarian instincts.
Even going back to Reagan, he had some libertarian instincts.
Now, I'm forgetting the name of the gentleman from Pasadena who was a representative who was libertarian as well.
Well-dressed fellow.
I forget his name right now.
But there was that sense, especially in Southern California.
And in Northern California, you almost kind of had left-wing libertarianism in the way north, you know, up in Shasta County where they were all hiding, growing their marijuana.
You know, they didn't like the state very much either.
And so it really is depressing to see what's happened.
And it really has accelerated.
If you remember back during COVID, that terrible scene with Newsom at that fancy restaurant having a hundreds and hundreds of dollar meal while he closed down everyone else.
You know, that's the kind of leadership you have.
It's the opposite of libertarianism.
This should be a good opportunity for us to, you know, to toot the horn of libertarianism.
But first we should look at what this part of the LA Hills looks like.
And it's absolutely devastating.
Someone pointed out it sort of looks like Gaza.
It is awful.
These are multi-million dollar homes that have been just burnt to a crisp.
And there are the fire is not contained at all.
And the reason it's not contained, Dr. Paul, is they ran out of water.
The fire hydrants are empty.
After two years of good rainfall.
Yeah, two years of rainfall.
The hydrants are empty.
Sorry, guys, you're on your own.
It's amazing.
So here, and what else?
It's just a cascade of failures on the part of the left, really, to be honest.
Go to the next one.
This is from the Federalist.
It's not just that the water is gone.
LA already shipped firefighting equipment to Ukraine.
And now Biden is planning another handout to Ukraine as California burns.
And here is from that article in the Federalists.
It's a conservative publication, so they will have their spin on it.
But if you go to the next one, Dr. Paul, here's from the article.
The fire department donated its own, quote, surplus supplies to help a foreign regime and is now caught flat-footed without the capacity to respond to the Pacific Palisades wildfire, which continues to cause deaths and untold damage to thousands of acres of land, including countless homes.
Far-left L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who was missing in action because she's busy attending an event in yet another foreign country, Ghana, also, listen to this, Dr. Paul, slashed the L.A. Fire Department's budget by $17.6 million for the 24-25 fiscal year.
Her initial proposal was $23 million, cutting probably the one thing the government does a somewhat decent job at, which is putting out fires.
They cut it.
It's not in this article, but I read somewhere that a lot of that money is being used for illegal immigrants.
I want to know if they saved the smelts.
Actually, I have Trump's quote later on that I'll read.
Yeah, that's it.
You know, this is something that they make you wonder, why do they do this?
Is it out of stupidity and ignorance?
Or is there some deliberateness to destruction?
Immigration, you know, could they be that dumb?
You know, and releasing all the prisoners and opening up the doors and stealing it from the veterans and this whole work.
You know, I have trouble with that because I don't want to say what I think I believe about our own government.
You know, you don't want to have to do that.
But, see, you know, so it's easy for me to give serious thought to the principle of Marxism.
Marxism wants chaos.
They want destruction.
And it is part of their theme that if they destroy the society, even though they would say, well, yeah, some of that is good and bad, but we want a different system.
We have to eliminate any support for this whole idea of freedom and free market.
But, you know, right now, it looks like their efforts have backfired and that maybe they awaken some people who say, we want to make the comparison.
And lo and behold, so I think those maps that show red and blue probably are sending a strong message to people saying, why are they doing this?
And they probably are starting to figure it out.
Yeah, and I mean, everyone has seen the eclipse of the homelessness, the drug addicts living on the street in LA and San Francisco, defecation.
I don't even need to go into some of the details.
All of these problems and what they're saying now, and I have not seen it definitively reported, but they're suspecting that these fires are actually started by arson, that homeless people and people with mental problems that are on the streets are lighting fires.
Several of them have already been lit.
And plus with that with the Santa Ana winds, which are very strong, there you go.
So that's a good part of it.
But the other thing that's sort of dying, which should die here, is the DEI, because there's so much of this involved with this.
In fact, if you go to the next one, this is from the same article from the Federalist.
The city has faced firefighter shortages for several years, and the number of federal fires for the U.S. Forest Service has also atrophied considerably since 2020.
So they don't have enough firefighters.
But go to this next one.
This is an article in NPR back from 2023.
Firefighting is mostly white and male.
A California program aims to change that.
Well, how did that go?
How did that go?
So being obsessed on what color the skin of your firefighter is, I wouldn't even say Matt Gates put something down that has a bad word in it, but he says, I don't give a blank what color the firefighter is as long as he's putting out the fire.
Yeah.
You know, the issue of diversity, I think it's so wicked and weird.
And, you know, you're a bad person if you don't endorse their ideas of what diversity is.
But I think what they give us is the opposite of diversity, because what about the exclusion and the cancellations and getting rid of the opinions of people that have a different opinion about COVID?
Governor's Incompetent Response 00:09:13
And do they get hired and put in these places?
No, they don't.
They're excluded.
So how can they be diverse if they take it and exclude anybody who has a thought and a desire to be a free society and freedom for the individual?
Oh, no, we don't even know anything about it.
It doesn't exist, so why strive for it?
All that nonsense.
But they use that as an excuse for manipulation and saying they're going to take care of it.
And then they say, well, do you think, you know, a libertarian, I think most libertarians, including myself, that, you know, under the Constitution and common sense, if there is a town that needs a policeman, they can't.
I lived in a town near Pittsburgh, and I was always fascinated.
We knew the police force.
We had one policeman rode around on a motorcycle.
So we have a right to a police.
But what did they do?
They purposely, you know, my wife keeps up pretty much with this, but she just assumed I didn't talk politics all the time.
But you know what got to her the most?
Was seeing the hoodlumps tearing up stores and breaking doors, walking out and the police standing around doing nothing.
And that can't happen just out of stupidity.
There has to be some deliberate evil that produces a system like that.
And maybe there's a shift on that.
Maybe the diversity, et cetera, will be repealed.
But even though it's backing off right now, don't let your guard down.
Somebody will be back with another stupid idea.
Well, I want to thank a shout out to Daniel Hamill, who's donated $20 to us today.
We appreciate supporting the show.
Now, it even gets worse, Dr. Paul.
I mean, I hate to do this, but put on this next clip.
Now, this is a letter that was sent to the mayor.
If we put that one on.
Now, Ryan Saavedra put this up.
LA Fire Chief Kristen Crowley warned Mayor Karen Bass last month that the $17 million she cut from the department's budget, quote, severely limited the department's capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.
And if you go to the next one, you can actually see the letter that she sent December 17th saying, Mayor, you cut all the money for firefighting.
We're going to have a problem here.
It's unbelievable the level of incompetence.
Now, are we sure about the statement that some of these assets and money went to Ukraine?
Didn't we send a little bit over there already in the last two years?
Yeah, fire equipment, a little bit of money too.
It's amazing.
So the bigger the fire in LA, the more money you send to Ukraine.
Exactly, that makes sense.
I haven't figured that one out yet.
Well, you mentioned Donald Trump, and he's a great troll.
He really is.
He's a master.
But here's what he posted on his social media yesterday.
Of course, with a funny turn of phrase, he likes to make fun of people.
We know that.
And people that can't take it, you know, they get angry.
But if you put that next one on, Governor Gavin Newscomb, it's like junior high level.
I guess that's why I like it.
Governor Gavin Newscomb refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water from excess rain and snow melt from the north to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.
He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt by giving it less water.
It didn't work.
But didn't care about the people of California.
Now the ultimate price is being paid.
I will demand that the incompetent governor allow an incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow into California.
He's to blame for this.
On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, no firefighting planes, a true disaster.
You know, they're trying to cancel out history because I'm fascinated with reading history of the Roman Empire, the Roman Republic, where they had huge reservoirs and running water.
You know, at the time, they had aqueducts that brought water in.
Saved the water.
So they used nature, and nature was there to help take care of the people.
So now what they do, they stop nature.
They reject it.
Here it is.
They say, oh, is nature, we want nature.
We want things to be natural.
Say, oh, you got some rain and you have a place here we can store a little bit of that.
Why don't you do it?
Oh, no, that might interfere with some snail or snake or something.
Some rattlesnake.
Oh, boy.
I don't know how people tolerate it.
But now, things are changing.
I always argue that people don't vote from their heart or their brain.
They vote from their bellies.
And you know, there's a few in politics that always said, you know, it's economics, it's the economy stupid.
I think there's a true statement to that, even in this past election.
And the people are nervous, but the goal that I have is trying to get the message out of not saying, well, yes, it is the economy.
So send me more money.
Steal more money.
Print more money, but send it to me because my grocery bills are high.
So if we don't accomplish some education there, it takes a long time.
And I think institutions and many, there are many, like the Mises Institute, they're raising up a new generation where young people, and we make our effort in our own homeschooling program to understand economics because as long as you understand this authoritarian approach that printing money is not a good idea.
Spending money is not a good idea.
Debt is not a good idea.
Oh, yes, but on the short run, it looks pretty good.
And on the long run, it means that some people do well and other people suffer the consequences because somebody eventually has to pay the bills.
Yeah, absolutely.
On top of the incompetence, you also have corruption.
I think it's corruption.
I guess the viewers can decide for themselves.
But I found this article from the LA Times a couple of years ago, I think it was about a year ago.
Put this next one on.
LA Times, you're not going to believe this, Dr. Paul.
This is really unbelievable.
The new head of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will make $750,000 a year, nearly twice as much as her predecessor.
That is the head of the water department.
$750,000 a year.
Listen, she was speaking yesterday about why they don't have any water in the fire hydrants.
Listen to that first clip, 30 seconds of that first clip, and listen to the $750,000 a year water person.
We ran out of water and the first tank at about 4:45 p.m. yesterday.
We ran out of water on the second tank about 8:30 p.m. and the third tank about 3 a.m. this morning.
Those tanks helped with the pressure on the fire hydrants and the heels at Palestine.
And because we were pushing so much water in our trunk line and so much water was being used before it can't get to the tents, we were not able to fill the tents fast enough.
So the consumption of water was faster than we can provide water in a trunk line.
Okay, that's true.
Oh, I understand.
That's okay.
I understand now.
Apparently, she's a good friend of the mayor, and the mayor pushed for her to get this very lucrative job.
People might say, well, you know, there has been inflation.
Her prices went up, and we have to take care of our leaders.
I studied the wrong thing.
I should be studying water.
What a tragedy.
Well, speaking of the mayor, now here's the mayor.
She was on another foreign trip, another junket, while the city burned down.
A journalist actually doing journalism caught her at the airport.
Let's listen to 30 seconds of this next clip.
Did I say 30 seconds or a minute?
Whatever I said on there of this.
Here's the mayor coming back from a foreign trip.
Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madam Mayor?
Have you nothing to say today?
Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today?
Elon Musk says that you're utterly incompetent.
Are you considering your position?
Madam Mayor, have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today who are dealing with this disaster?
So anyway, there's the mayor.
That is the greatest clip because it points out, you know, it tells you so much.
They don't have an answer.
NATO And Russia's Standoff 00:07:12
They don't even want to be respectful and try to it.
And they just march on and figure they're going to get away with it tomorrow and the next day.
How about, you know, how about just an apology?
You know, I'm sorry.
You know, it's pretty amazing to see this.
And you made reference to it earlier on.
Here we are.
So in light of all of this, billions of billions of dollars of damage in LA.
And we're not ones to say that the state should cover the cost, but when you look at where the money goes, here's Anthony Blinken.
He's tweeting out this morning, as if nothing is wrong and nothing has happened.
Put on this next tweet.
As part of our continued surge in security assistance for Ukraine, we are now providing $500 million in weapons and equipment under previous drawdowns for Ukraine's self-defense.
The United States and more than 50 nations stand united with Ukraine.
Well, what about the self-defense of the people having homes in LA getting burned up?
And what about not having a policeman in your own hometown?
But we keep building up Ukraine, and the more we send over there, of course, that's the problem.
You know, NATO and others who sent the weapons in there to have all this manipulation.
So it is based on, you know, two philosophy.
One, where individuals in a voluntary situation with rules of nonviolence are in charge versus that we allow some people to grab power and they declare they're smarter than everybody.
And the worse things get, you know, the more power they want.
And the saying goes, you start one program who causes the need for two more new ones.
And it's pyramids, government pyramids.
But the tragedy is, and will come, is that when that pyramid of dependency and spending and inflation has to be liquidated because you can't keep building it, it collapses, that is when all that is reversed.
And that's when you see people are in trouble right now.
But I think that's only a hint of the problems that we face.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, the second thing we want to just comment on really is that Trump gave a press conference, I think, at Mar-a-Lago maybe two days ago.
I want to say this the 7th of January.
And he actually made a lot of sense on Ukraine.
And it was very promising.
So we know that eventually we're going to criticize some of his things.
So when he does something good, we also want to point it out.
In fact, I have the audio clip of what he said.
In fact, I found it very difficult to find a newspaper article about it anywhere.
But here is the audio clip.
Let's play this whole clip because it's very sensible.
From Trump, if we have that third clip.
It's going to take a minute.
Here we go.
Okay, listen to Trump on Ukraine and Russia.
So, you know, a big part of the problem was Russia for many, many years, long before Putin said you could never have NATO involved with Ukraine.
Now, they've said that.
That's been like written in stone.
And somewhere along the line, Biden said, no, they should be able to join NATO.
Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feeling about that.
But there were a lot of mistakes made in that negotiation.
And when I heard the way that Biden was negotiating, I said, you're going to end up in a war.
And it turned out to be a very bad war.
And it could escalate.
That war could escalate to be much worse than it is right now.
They can never join NATO.
Well, my view is that it was always understood.
In fact, I believe that they had a deal, and then Biden broke it.
They had a deal which would have been a satisfactory deal to Ukraine and everybody else, but that Biden said, no, you have to be able to join NATO.
So very sensible.
And yet, there's so much information and details on what we did, not only when the Cold War ended, but later on, all the conversation.
Jimmy Baker was very much involved in promising we would never be on your doorstep.
Unfortunately, they didn't get more explicit, like a contract.
We will not put NATO next door to you.
So this whole idea that all of a sudden, it just still really annoys me because it's still said on the three majors, we haven't made enough progress yet.
The statement is they date it from the day Russia invaded Ukraine.
Not when NATO threw out one a government that they didn't like because they were friendly toward Russia.
They never say that.
Yeah, they never do.
Except by our friends.
Yeah.
I think that statement is great.
Yeah.
The thing that's remarkable is that we even consider it a remarkable statement because it seems so matter of fact.
If you put NATO, an adversary, on the doorstep, Russia's going to get upset.
We would feel the same way, you know.
So he just has a way of blurting out the truth.
And I hope he's got a lot of hawks on his team.
I hope he doesn't listen to them and listens to his inner voice.
Well, I think one great neglect we have are dealing with motives, how and why wars get started, and what's their beef.
And yet that is important.
Of course, I addressed that subject during the debates.
What was the motivation for 9-11?
And in this case, they aren't asking that question enough.
But, you know, Trump is independent-minded enough.
I don't think he's the kind that starts missing words.
So that's why we have to give him some encouragement.
And when he has a libertarian idea, way to go.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to thank all of our viewers for tuning in as we continue to work on our studio, trying to bring things up to date.
We've been almost doing this for almost 10 years, if you can believe it, Dr. Paul.
It's pretty amazing.
So we appreciate you tuning in.
And please hit that thumbs up or the like button and share our program with your friends and with your enemies as well.
Over to you, Doug.
Very, very good.
And there's reasons for us to be at times optimistic and move in that direction.
And it's not like the conflicts that we have now, the good and the evil, the authoritarians versus the ones who honor and respect liberty.
That's been going on a long time.
We've been through it in this country quite often.
We're in the middle of it, but we're also at the beginning of a climactic need to change because the system that we have permitted to exist is bankrupt.
So it can't continue.
You just can't print more money and run up more debt and make everybody happy.
It's not going to work.
And this whole idea that we can be the policemen of the world, it's a false illusion.
But we should have to change the philosophy of what we think we should have in this country.
And we would do a lot better.
If we're looking for peace and prosperity, that is the direction that I think we should go in.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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