Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you very much, thank you for coming. It sounds like we’re getting close to an election. Thank you very much for being here, I want to thank all the veterans that are on the stage, and all the veterans out here and the rest who have come. I would like to introduce two family members here, I think they’re up here. I have my two granddaughters are with me, Lisa and Linda, they’re sisters and they’re students. I also want to thank Senator Kent Sorenson for stopping by, that was a very nice visit. But this is a wonderful evening because we’re going to emphasis our national defense, our veterans, and our military, which is, of course, very important. As has been said, and as I’ve said for many years, the constitution is a rather important document, and we should uphold it. And the constitution is very clear on what the responsibilities are at the federal level. At the federal level, defense is a vital function of the government.

OWS Protesters: You don’t care about student education, you want to eliminate student aid, Mr. Paul…

Ron Paul: Freedom of speech, isn’t it wonderful. They deserve attention, there are a lot of problems. And the problems are manifested by a lot of people being upset in this country. And I think a lot of people have that. We’re all upset and we want to change it in Washington, matter of fact, that’s what our purpose is. If you want to change something, you have to know what’s wrong. As a physician, if I didn’t get the diagnosis right, I couldn’t possibly get the treatment right. So, therefore, the diagnosis is very important, because right now, most people in this country know there’s something seriously wrong, there’s something seriously wrong with our foreign policy. And, something is seriously wrong with our economy and, of course, we all know there’s something seriously wrong with our monetary system, and something seriously wrong with our Federal Reserve System

But I think the best way to boil down the crisis that we face, is a debt crisis. We’re in too much debt, it’s unsustainable, our productivity is going down, the special interests have benefitted, the Wall Streeters get bailed out and the debt is being dumped on the people, and that has to be reversed, let me tell you. But we’re in this trouble because we haven’t followed the rule of law, the rule of law is the constitution. Article 1 Section 8 is very clear, it tells us exactly what we’re allowed to do, and we’re not allowed to do anything that is not explicitly given to us in the constitution.

Matter of fact, the constitution is mainly a document of prohibitions, prohibitions against the federal government intruding in our lives and intruding in our economic conditions, and also, there is no authority in the constitution to become the policeman of the world. And though there’s clear evidence that we should have a strong national defense, and that is a vital function of the federal government, we also know that if we do not take care of financial affairs at home, the problems that we can get from the problems overseas may magnify. The Soviet System collapsed for economic reasons, not for military reasons. So we have to maintain a healthy economy every bit as much as we have to have a strong national defense. One of the reasons we’ve gotten into trouble overseas has been because we haven’t followed the rules. It’s been a long time since this country declared a war. The last time we did it, after we were attacked and properly so, we attacked both Japan and Germany and, guess what, it was declared by the Congress, and was supported by the people. And it was over in approximately 4 years. We had proper authority and we were together. Since that time, we haven’t done it. I maintain that a president should never take a country to war unless there is a declaration of war, and fight them and win them and get them over with.

For many years, young men and women have been called to service, some of us have been drafted, others have joined with the purpose of providing defense for this country. But because so many of our young people have in the past, and currently, joined to defend this country, they can become disillusioned if they find out that the fighting and the killing and the spending of the money, doesn’t provide national defense, that we’re not under threat. Sometimes we go looking for trouble and putting our troops in harm’s way unnecessarily.

And because our country is literally bankrupt, we can’t pay our bills and we have to keep borrowing, we keep spending, we keep printing money and we cannot maintain this presence around the world. So, therefore, we can’t even afford to take care of our people back home. So my suggestion is to look carefully at our foreign policy and question whether or not we should be in 130 countries and have 900 bases. I say that’s way too many, it’s time to come home from most of those places. But too often when we’ve been called to duty and so many of us have gone, coming back home has not always been the best of receptions. Think of today, as both a physician and a congressman, and having been in the military, I have to deal with a lot of veterans’ problems. It’s very, very frustrating, because, so often, veterans are shunned, they don’t get the treatment they really deserve and the money is being wasted elsewhere. It took a long time for the victims of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War to finally get all their treatments, we had the Persian Gulf War Syndrome.

And even today, we’re currently suffering from abuse of our veterans when they come home. Hundreds of thousands are looking for help. I had a young man the other day who just got out of the military and, of course, he was sad and despondent about how many fellow soldiers were killed when he was over in Iraq. But he said, “You know what’s happening now? Some of my buddies now are committing suicide, it’s like and epidemic”. So there’s something terribly wrong with the system where it ends up so tragically and the help isn’t available. But I believe that it’s related to our foreign policy. The foreign policy should dictate how we go about, how we go to war. We should obey the constitution, go very sparingly, and we should go to preserve the peace and prosperity and the safety of this country, but not to go looking for trouble in different places of the world. We’ve had a foreign policy that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So often, we go around and we find a friendly dictator and say our national security interests are best if we prop up this dictator, no matter what he does to his people. We’re done it numerous times. So we give him a lot of money. And then it goes badly and he changes his mind and then we have a fight. Then there are other countries we go to and they don’t want to cooperate with us, so we just go ahead and we use weapons and destroy their country and bomb those countries. So we either use force or money, force or money. And I thought, there has to be another option.

How about talking to them once in a while instead of using force and intimidation. I was called to service in 1962 during the missile crisis of Cuba. That was resolved rather quickly, but then I was in the air force for 5 years; I did not go to Vietnam, but it was during that period of time. But if you add up the decade the French were there and the decade the Americans were in Vietnam trying to settle a civil war in Vietnam, how many people were killed? Probably maybe a million Vietnamese, tens of thousands of French soldiers, and then 60,000 Americans, and then we had to leave after all this money and waste. And what did that usher in economically? And Johnson at the time said, “We can have guns and butter, it doesn’t matter, spend money on more welfare and more guns”. And they gave us the 1960s which were a very, very bad time. But the argument for us to go there wasn’t whether to go to the Congress and find out whether we should declare war or not. The argument was that if we don’t go there and stop communism from rolling over, there would be a domino effect and that whole region would turn communist. It turned out that we walked away from there after a lot of tragedy, China became less communistic when we left, they became capitalistic in many way, and now they’re our banker. So what’s happened in Vietnam? Has it got worse, did they go communist? No, all of a sudden they became Westernized. By looking at what we were doing, they started trading and interrelating with us, we travelled there, we invest there, they come here. And just think of what has been achieved between our two countries in peace, and what was not achieved in war and waste. We need to look at that.

A strong America is necessary, a strong America is going to give us a much better chance for peace. But, also, what we need is we also have to have prosperity as well. And, therefore, economic conditions are so important. Debt is the big problem right now that we’re facing, and we have to admit it. So even if somebody would say, “No, we can’t cut nickel out of the military budget”, just remember, the military budget is different from the defense budget. The military budget is all the weapons the military-industrial complex wants. But there is a big difference between that. But today, the leaders of both parties are not interested in cutting one nickel out of overseas expenditures, most of them want to increase it. And they’re furious if you don’t meet the automatic increases. And my suggestion is different, my suggestion is that we have problems here at home, we’re spending too much money overseas, we’re getting in too much trouble. Our obligation is to take care of the people here at home a long time before we ought to be the policeman of the world.

So this means that I’ve made a modest suggestion for the first year in office, and that is, cut spending by 1 trillion dollars in the first year. This would take some change in attitudes, like I said, we have to have a change in our foreign policy, not sacrifice 1 penny for defense, but stop spending so much money overseas. Now that should be a lot easier for we, the people, to come together on. All, liberals, moderates, conservatives, if they want to concentrate on taking care of America, why can’t we come together and stop this spending overseas? I would think that would be the easiest place in the world to cut spending. So half of the spending that I’m proposing in the first year would come from overseas spending. But it would mean that we would bring the troops home, we’d bring them home from Korea and Japan and Germany. There may well be an immediate economic benefit by all those salaries and wages of the military spending their money here at home instead of in Germany and Japan. But that still won’t be enough cutting, you’d have to cut some more, so I have picked 5 departments to cut and then, also, go back on the budget levels to 2006. You know, it wasn’t like government was too small back in 2006. Just go back to 2006, and that gets you down, after 3 years, the budget would be balanced. The only reason that this doesn’t happen is because people in Washington are in denial, they don’t think there’s a spending problem.

Today, guess what, the President has announced that he’s going to ask the Congress to raise the national debt by 1.2 trillion dollars. No, absolutely not. But guess what kind of tricky they have, and guess who did it? It was the Congress last summer when they had this resolution, when they created this super-committee that was going to solve all our problems, they made a deal with the President. This is the way it works: the President goes to the Congress and says, “I need to raise the national debt limit by 1.2 trillion dollars”. And if Congress doesn’t reject the request, in 15 days it becomes law, automatically. They have to reject it. And guess what, he’s going to ask for this increase when they’re on Christmas vacation. So the debt, in a way, is going up automatically, they’re on auto pilot. And, believe me, this economy is not going to sustain it much longer. This is a worldwide phenomenon, this is a dollar phenomenon, it’s a monetary phenomenon, and it’s intertwined. We are very much engaged right now in bailing out Europe. We’re doing this through the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve does it off the books, they don’t even get audited. Until we can get rid of the Fed, we at least ought to know exactly what they’re doing and Congress ought to force them to tell us what they’re doing.

Audience: End the Fed, End the Fed.

Ron Paul: We’re approaching a crisis time, economically speaking, and politically speaking. Our liberties are at threat, too, not by an outside invader, nobody is going to invade us, we have the strongest military, we’ve done a great job militarily. But we’ve also taken that oath to be aware of enemies, both, foreign and domestic, and we have a lot of our freedoms under threat right now. But we’re at a crossroads and we have to make a decision. And this is a decision that the Founders actually had to make, because they got sick and tired of the King, they got sick and tired of the taxes and the oppression and soldiers being put in their houses and the loss of their privacy. And the American people are getting that way, too. And we have to make a decision, once again, about what the role of government should be. The Founders who wrote the constitution said the role of the federal government, at least, would be very, very minimal. And right now, though, the federal government is very, very large which means that every power and authority the federal government gets, undermines your personal liberty. The goal in all political action, from my viewpoint, should be the promotion and preservation of individual liberty.

If our military has been so successful and we don’t have to worry about anybody invading us, then what are our concerns about? To me, it is the economy and the way we’ve lived beyond our means and the way we have become careless with our liberties, that we allow our government to do too much. We had a major crisis, a major event, which was so terrible for us to withstand. That, of course, happened on 9/11. 9/11 was a very bad episode and a lot had to be done. But we didn’t do exactly the right things at the right time. For instance, one of the first things they did within days, before they decided who did what and where we would go, they passed a piece of legislation that had been floating around for years and they shoved it on the Floor and within an hour it was passed and nobody had time to read it. And that was the PATRIOT Act and that took away your 4th Amendment rights, and we don’t need the PATRIOT Act. And, of course, just recently we have had some other changes. Matter of fact, early this year, the President announced a policy change. He said now that it was proper for him to have the authority to assassinate an American citizen even if they have not been charged with anything, if he thought it was necessary. Now the person they picked out was probably a very bad guy, he talked about stirring up violence but he was never charged with it, he never had a trial, and yet it was decided that he would be assassinated. So we used a drone and we assassinated him in Yemen. So let it go by, he’s a bad guy, he’s gone. But the principle, the precedent, is very, very dangerous. So the next week they decided his son looked like a pretty shady character too, so they sent another missile over to get the son. Well, they got him, plus his cousin, they were back in the backyard barbequing. They killed him both, and the son was 16 years old. And this is not the way America is supposed to be, we’re supposed to be a nation of law, the rule of law is what we want.

So, in one sense, when we go in with the military, we take the oath and we go and fight and endanger ourselves to protect our constitution, and at a same time, our constitution is being eroded right here at home. Just this last week or two weeks ago, I guess, the National Defense Authorization Act … I’m always impressed that so many people know about it, that means we have a healthy society and the internet is working. But that bill essentially eliminates posse comitatus, it is institutionalizing military law, that the military can arrest an American citizen without charges, and be denied an attorney and be held indefinitely, even in a foreign prison. This is not good for us. And, fortunately, we’re able to get some information out, and a lot of what we’ve done in our campaign makes use of the internet. But also, there’s an attack on the internet right now. The bill that that was going to stop all theft on the internet, which means they’re opening up the doors to know everything you do and to measure everything you do to protect you from yourself. Let me tell you, governments can’t protect you from yourself and they don’t need to be taking over the internet, either.

Of course, all these things are done to take away the 4th Amendment, they call that the PATRIOT Act. For the internet it’s the stop online piracy act, it’s always these good things. Even when that PATRIOT Act was being voted on, I remember so clearly because I sat down next to another member and he was voting for it. And guess what, I was voting against it. And I asked him, “Why are you voting for this, you probably don’t even know what’s in it, you haven’t had a chance to read it?” He said, “Oh, I know that”. I said, “You know there’s going to be some bad stuff in there, don’t you?” and I told him a few things. He said, “Yea, I know that”. I asked, “Why are you going to vote for it?” and he said, “Well, the conditions are we just had this attack, people want us to do something, and it’s called the PATRIOT Act, how can I vote against the PATRIOT Act? What would I do if I had to go home and explain it to them?” And I said, “Well, that’s your job, go home and explain it to them why you’re doing it”.

We will have to make a decision real soon, whether it’s six months or two years, I don’t know. But it’s real soon.

To be continued. This is an incomplete rush transcript.