Audio: Ron Paul on the Glenn Beck Program (Radio)

Transcript + Audio – March 23, 2009

Show: Glenn Beck Program (Radio)
Date: 3/23/2009

Transcript:

Glenn Beck: Congressman Ron Paul is with us now. Congressman, are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Libertarian Party?

Ron Paul: Boy, that’s a tricky question. If I answer honestly, could I be in trouble? That’s the real question.

Glenn Beck: Well, I wanted to know, if you answer yes to that and if you happen to have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car, then you’re definitely a militiaman.

Ron Paul: Well, since this is on public record I have to tell you the truth… yes, I have been a member.

Glenn Beck: Do you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car.

Ron Paul: Yes, I do.

Glenn Beck: Oh, boy. You just stay on the phone, we’re tracing the call right now. You just stay on the phone.

Ron Paul: Yea, but you may be traced as well for bringing up this subject.

Glenn Beck: I know, oh I know they are tracing my calls.

Ron Paul: You better be careful too.

Glenn Beck: Listen, Congressman, you know there is this story that came out last week about Missouri, where they did this study about who is a militiaman, and there were some pretty remarkable things in there. For instance, if you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car then that’s a sign. If you talk about the constitution, if you’re against the United Nations, if you have ever passed along cartoons against the FBI, ATF or IRS, then that’s another sign. I mean, this is insane.

Ron Paul: You know, they’re really taking on something and I don’t know how they can handle it. Hopefully this will awaken the American people because I think I saw a poll the other day where 25% of the American people now think the UN is not a good idea and that we should be out of it.

What are they going to do? Round us all up or what?

Glenn Beck: Well, I will tell you this: the latest on the United Nations is that today they said the G20 should be disbanded and they should have a security council for the economies. And 1% of everyone’s stimulus package needs to go to the UN. That’s crazy!

Ron Paul: You know, you’re not supposed to waste a crisis, as Rahm Emanuel says. So this crisis is going to be used by the people who do believe in world government. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, I think they’re pretty honest. I think they’re open about it and I think they intellectually believe in it, every bit as much as we believe in national sovereignty and personal liberty. They think we should have a world government. So, this crisis now is not only a danger to us for the economic reasons, but is also a danger to our liberties and the whole concept of what the United States stands for.

Glenn Beck: Congressman, first of all, let’s go right to the Geithner bailout of the banks, buying the toxic assets for one trillion dollars. This is a plan that was the original TARP plan, that they then came out and said it would not work, it would be a disaster. And now they are saying they have to do it, and it’s going to be the savior. It’s a trillion dollars.

Ron Paul: Yeah, you know, it’s just redundancy, like you said. It’s like the original TARP plan which they tried and tried. But the Fed, unfortunately, already has the authority to do it, and they announced last week that they were going to buy up these toxic assets. How many times can they buy these types of assets? And what they’re saying….

Glenn Beck: Hold it, hold it just a second. I’m sorry to interrupt. I swear to you this is just in. This is according to the Treasury; they have just announced that toxic assets are no longer toxic assets. They are now to be called ‘legacy assets.’

Ron Paul: Lying through their teeth.

Glenn Beck: I just wanted to correct it, we got to get the right phrases here. So you were talking about the toxic/legacy assets?

Ron Paul: What it is, is it’s worthless. You know, they claim that there’s no market for them. Well, there is no market because they are worthless. They are finding victims, and we are the victims. The taxpayers are the victims.

They can’t sell them because they have no value, and they should allow them to be eliminated. They have to be liquidated. But the thought here that they have to be brought up is preposterous. This thing could have practically been all over if they just would have allowew all these companies to go into bankruptcy. The bankruptcy court would have handled this, we wouldn’t have had to appropriate any money. We would have that mess with regulating salaries. That whole thing could have been stopped just by following the law, which should have been to let the bankruptcy court handle this.

Glenn Beck: Okay, so now we have a trillion dollars that they are proposing. The Fed and the Treasury are coming out and saying, “It’s a two trillion dollar problem, but we’ll take a trillion of it.” However, they were the same people that were telling us just six months ago that this is probably a 500 billion dollar problem, and they were going to overwhelm it with 700 billion dollars in bailout money.

Now the experts are saying, “No, no. The treasury is wrong, this is probably a 4 trillion dollar problem.” Is there a point, Congressman, where you see your fellow Congressmen saying, “Okay, enough is enough”?

Ron Paul: No, they’re like an addict. They’re addicted. They don’t know what else to do. They don’t understand free market economics. They’re in deep now, so they’re not going to back off. And I’ve been saying for a little while that because we’re locked in to this mentality, I think they’re going to destroy the dollar. It’s going to stop with the destruction of the dollar. We won’t be able to afford it. There’s no reason in the world to trust the value of the dollar in the long term, and yet, right now the world is still gravitating to the dollar. People are still buying Treasury bills, interest rates are very low. But that’s going to end, otherwise this will be a free gift to us and we could bail ourselves out forever and we wouldn’t have to work and all we’d have to do is print money and buy stuff from overseas.

So it has to end, there’s no way in the world you can create these trillions of dollars. Already the Fed is committed to more than 5 trillion dollars of either direct loans or guarantees. So, the commitment is overwhelming.

All the pressure is on the dollar and we saw a little bit of what could happen last Wednesday when the Fed announced their trillion dollar plan. And, you know, the dollar within 24 hours went down 4.5%. If it could do that in one hour, what would happen when people panic out of the dollar and the Chinese dump their dollars? It’s a very, very dangerous situation.

Glenn Beck: Congressman Ron Paul, last week, I think it was on Wednesday at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, we started to monetize our own debt. Every economic expert that I have talked to and that I believe has credibility because they weren’t saying, “Oh, there’s no problem, there’s no problem”. They haven’t changed their tune. All the economic experts that were talking to me now that actually have a record of being right said, “This is end-game here, this is the beginning of the end where you buy the debt from yourself for another trillion dollars. It’s the death-spiral”. Do you agree or disagree with that?

Ron Paul: Absolutely, and although they have monetized debt and they bought them in the market, they have never done this before, although they’ve had the authority to do it. They bought directly from the Treasury. So, Congress is not going to put their foot down, because that bails them out. Congress can appropriate endlessly, and the people in charge right now happen to believe that’s the proper way of solving this problem.

Glenn Beck: Where is this trillion? They printed a trillion dollars yesterday or last week. Where is this trillion dollars coming from with Timothy Geithner?

Ron Paul: Well, they’re going to start off with getting, I think, a hundred billion from the TARP funds, and even though they talked about that 1 trillion last week, that hasn’t transpired yet. That is just in the pipeline, but it will come about.

They have been doing this all along. If they appropriate money, it ends up with the Fed having to monetize it anyway. And if the Fed buys the debt directly, and buys these mortgage debts directly, there’s really no real reason why the Treasury should be doing this, because the Fed can do it. They could have done it all along. They’re either awfully confused, or they’re trying to hide something, or maybe it’s both.

Glenn Beck: Congressman, the concept came to me today as I was talking about Barack Obama and his… I think it’s 634 billion dollars… you know, in a down payment for health care that they’re just pulling off to the side.

First Question: Is there an escrow account that we should be watching where they are pulling the 634 billion dollars off to the side? Where is that lockbox, as Al Gore used to talk about?

Ron Paul: That’s not there. All this promise that you can deficit finance and print the money… it’s endless, it never stops, it’s absolutely bizarre. It’s just a wonder that the markets are doing as well as they are doing. The markets are doing lousy, but the dollar is doing better than it deserves, but that of course is going to quit.

Glenn Beck: The other question that I have is: At what point… I mean, I don’t hear anyone talk about what it looks like… I mean what we have basically is a giant balloon payment. At some point we are going to have to pay for all this stuff. And I don’t hear anybody talking about it. At what point is it in our best interest to let the dollar collapse, because our children will be paying 80% taxes all across the board, because we can’t pay for this.

Ron Paul: Well, at a certain point you can’t pay and the debt won’t be paid. It’s how it’s liquidated that’s important. You or I, if we go bankrupt we can liquidate debt by just not paying and going to bankruptcy court. Governments don’t do that. What they do is they want inflation. They’re working real hard to inflate, because if they can double the money supply your dollar loses half its value, your real debt is only one-half. So they pay it off, you know, with junk money. So that is what they are hoping for, because they know they can’t pay the debt, the American people can’t pay the debt, but the debt has to be liquidated. Governments liquidate it by inflation, so that’s why you can be assured that the inflation is coming, and Bernanke has never hidden from that. He has always said that he knows how to inflate like nobody else has, and he is working diligently at this, which means that he is doing an immoral, unconstitutional, bizarre act of destroying the value of the money.

People should go to jail for this. If you do it or I do it then that’s counterfeiting. But it’s the same thing and they’re doing it deliberately and that’s how they will take care of the debt.

Ron Paul: The idea that these militias are creeping up… I mean, on this program I have asked you before, I think when you were running for president… I talked to you about some of the people who are Ron Paul supporters or claim to be, that are 9/11 truthers, etc, etc. I think there are dangerous people on the left and the right. Some of them voted for Ron Paul, some of them voted for Barack Obama, some of them voted for John McCain, some of them voted for people I’ve never even heard off. Some of them don’t vote at all.

But some of us have at least being consistent in saying that we are on a road to fascism. We said it under George W. Bush, and we’re saying it now under Barack Obama. It’s the same problem, just a different party and a different face. How worried are you that the constitution is viewed as a code word. That we are entering a time when the conditions are growing more in the favor of being able to stomp down any type of opposition by the parties in Washington.

Ron Paul: Well, I think the worse the economy gets the more polarized the people become, because wealth dissipates and people get poor and they get angry and they misdirect their anger and therefore, you know, there’s always a threat of violence and, of course, that is what I’ve worked so hard to try to avoid because I consider this an intellectual fight.

I believe that if people know why it’s in their best interest to defend the constitution and personal liberties, then we can achieve victory on this. But there’s a lot of confusion and people say, “These people are scoundrels” and they are, and they feel desperate. They don’t know anything else to do so they want to resort to violence and that’s where the danger comes from.

Inflation wipes out the middle-class, leads to political chaos and then the destruction of the political system. We’re about as much done in the economic system, so now we’re seeing the early and rising tide of political chaos, and that to me is the dangerous phase. So, I don’t know how to reverse this other than promoting a better idea to beat their ideas, and their ideas are internationalism, globalism, printing-press money, Federal Reserve, don’t give a hoot about the constitution.

And just once again believe in individual freedom and have confidence that freedom works and that’s how you get prosperity. You don’t have to be a bleeding heart thinking that it’s the only way you can take care of people, because quite frankly, that backfires and creates more poor people, not more wealthy people.

Glenn Beck: Are you or the members of Congress or the Senate moved by the amount of mail… when they were sending teabags to people, did that make a difference? Does it make a difference to have the phone calls come in? Does it make a difference if they would march on Washington and let people see their faces? What makes a difference to these people at this point?

Ron Paul: On occasion it does. I think this whole thing that Congress felt compelled to do something about the salaries was a reflection that if the people rise up the Congress will react. But unfortunately, you know, that was so superficial and misdirected that it missed the whole point. They should have never had the money in the first place, so that was not the answer. But the answer is yes. If enough people rise up and tell a member, “Look, if you don’t do it we’re going to throw you out”, and then end up throwing them out. Most people in Washington are very politically oriented and if there is a true resistance by the people it does some good, otherwise I wouldn’t be involved in this at all.

But the problem is that it takes a long time for the transition and it gets too risky and right now we’re facing this crisis, so who knows how it’s going to turn out. But we should know soon because we live in very, very dangerous times and events are moving rather rapidly.

Glenn Beck: Do you see more people coming to your side in Washington? You see more people that are starting to get it, or is it still just as mindless as it has always been?

Ron Paul: No, I think its better. It’s certainly better outside of Washington. I hope when I go to Saint Louis this weekend it will be better out there too. That’s where I meet people that agree with me.

But in the past, what I’ve introduced have been bills that have been looked at and they go, “Yea, that will be nice”, but I’ve always been marginalized. But I have this bill in now, just to open the books of the Fed, just to audit the Fed, which is the H.R. 1207. I have over 40 co-sponsors on that, and that’s pretty good for me and I think the momentum is going to pick up on that because everybody in Washington now has heard once again from the American people, saying, “You guys better get your house in order. You at least ought to have transparency”.

And when people hear that the Fed is not even required to answer our questions then people become outraged. So I think that is the first step towards reforming our monetary system.

Glenn Beck: Ron Paul, Congressman from Texas, thank you so much, Sir.

Ron Paul: Good. Nice to be with you.

Glenn Beck: Congressman, are you still there? Oh shoot. Are you there Congressman?

Ron Paul: I am here.

Glenn Beck: I just wanted to know, you don’t have one of those snake flags, do you?

Ron Paul: I do. Should I put it away?

Glenn Beck: Well, no. Then you’re hiding it. Then we know you got something to hide.

Ron Paul: Oh ha ha, boy I’m trapped.

Glenn Beck: We’ll send Homeland Security over to your place.

Ron Paul: When are you going to hang it up behind you when you’re on TV?

Glenn Beck: I wore it, you missed it. I think it was Thursday’s episode. I wore a T-shirt with it on.

Ron Paul: Well, you are getting brave here.

Glenn Beck: Yes, you got that right. Thanks a lot, bye bye.