 Wednesday, it's 11 o'clock. It's March the 9th, 2022. Welcome to What Now, America. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. And today's title is Biden blocks Russian oil. He'll take heat. Cynthia, Lisa and Claire will not be able to join us today, but in her absence, I have a quote that she found and it's a quote from President Zelensky and it's a good one. And it's the following. Every drop of Russian oil sold is a drop of Ukrainian blood spilled. And that speaks for itself. Yesterday as an executive order, President Biden ordered the boycott of all Russian energy products into the United States. And that's the topic that we're here to discuss. And I'm pleased to announce that we have Jay Fidel and Karen Buzzard with us. Winston Welch is on assignment and Cynthia Lee Sinclair is on assignment as well. Good morning everyone, welcome. Good morning, we have a lot of assignments going on, eh? Yeah, we're busy here. You know, What Now, America? We don't sit around and watch CNN all day and we certainly don't watch Fox. So we're out there in the field making things happen, Jay. Hey, Jay, I got you on my screen, question to you. What kind of support will President Biden get the GOP on this ban, this boycott of Russian oil, not only oil, but also certainly natural gas products? I have to see this as a dynamic, Tim. You know, like if you follow the news and you do check cable, including Fox News, there are the same events happening every day. What do we see? Let me identify. We see people getting killed by the carload in Ukraine, by bombs from the air, mostly an artillery, long range artillery, and nothing that has happened in the sanctions has slowed that down. As a matter of fact, it's gotten worse. And this morning, there was big news about a huge maternity hospital that was blown to smithereens. And all these people were killed, including maternity mothers. Ah, God. All right, so that's, but it's a regular drumbeat. And the regular drumbeat is that Putin keeps on doing it and keeps on repressing the Russian people. This news that a lot of them are leaving, tens of thousands are leaving Russia because they're apparently able to do that if they have the money to live elsewhere. They're leaving Russia. They can't stand it anymore. It's their way of protesting, although they can't protest in public. And news reporters from all kinds of media are leaving Russia because they don't want to spend 15 years in jail. But it's a regular drumbeat. And for the same, there's a regular drumbeat about what happened to the Polish Migs, that's a drumbeat over like almost, well, 10 days anyway. Nothing has happened until last night we heard more. And that deal seems to be quote untenable. And I would like to talk with you about it today. And then finally, there's the US, there's the GOP. And its principal purpose in the world today is to undermine voters and undermine Biden, okay? And it's been relatively bipartisan that they don't like what's going on in Ukraine. But here's my point to answer your question. The news cycle moves on, it's dynamic. So if you ask me whether he's going to get cooperation from the GOP, it's only a matter of time, days probably before they start attacking him on everything he is doing in Ukraine. Watch this space and that includes oil. Okay, let me get to that point because the house is gonna take this up, the Senate's gonna take it up. I suspect there is bipartisan support. President Biden announced that yesterday when he said he was going to enact an executive order to boycott all Russian energy products. So where's the hypocrisy of a vote that supports the boycott? Yet, as you said, time marches on a week later, they're bludgeoning President Biden over the fact that gas prices are higher at the pump. Where's the hypocrisy in that? How about everywhere? How about everywhere? How about GOP equals hypocrisy? And I don't think there's any question. Is it gonna look for an opening? There already are looking for openings to show that he's not doing a good job. And of course they're gonna have a lot of people in this country supporting the notion that we shouldn't be paying higher gas prices, that it's all his fault. And he is destroying the economy of the United States by his moves. And what's really interesting about that is what it means. I mean, I think that's what's gonna happen is already starting. What it means though is that a good number of people, tens of millions of people in this country don't believe that what's happening in Ukraine has any effect on them. They don't care. Eastern Europe, Longway, Putin, Longway. So that they can reject that. And they can say, I don't wanna pay gas prices, additional gas prices. Well, the United States has had proxy wars in the past. Vietnam comes to mind. And certainly many other ones with Russia. And the United States American population seemed to rally around the initial phases of these kinds of proxy wars. Vietnam went horribly off track and half the country was protesting against it. But the bottom line is we tend to rally around a military action in support of our friends and our NATO. What seems to be wrong with today's society as to saying yes to one thing, saying yes to an embargo. And then a week later saying, this is not what we wanted. Everything, Tim, is being politicized. Everything. This morning there was an article in the paper about a guided missile cruiser, a Navy ship that costs billions of dollars. Where the commanding officer sued the Navy because they wanted to remove him from the ship because he refused to take a vaccine in violation of Navy policy. And he won in a federal court with a federal MAGA judge in Florida. He won. This is really something. And what the Navy did, and this is to my point, the Navy took the ship off the line. He said, okay, you wanna leave somebody who doesn't comport with Navy requirements for vaccines. You wanna force us and force us to keep somebody we don't think is qualified to command a ship like that, to keep, to leave him on the ship. We're taking the ship off the line. We're decommissioning the ship. Now you have real fragmentation in the military. So the military now right to the core of its good order and discipline is being politicized. Really awful. And you say to yourself, well, okay, we need the military to go hither and yon, maybe even into Poland, whatever, NATO, whatnot. But this kind of thing is happening. What I'm telling you is that everything is capable of being politicized and things of being politicized you never thought could be, should be, or would be politicized. It's different. It's unprecedented. Great point, Jay. Thank you. Karen, to what degree will this boycott be felt in the United States? And will the boycott basically overshadow the already existing increase at the pump due to the threat of Russian oil and its impact around the consumers of Russian oil? President Biden quoted, I think he cited a 75 cent increase at the pump already before Russia invaded Ukraine. So will Biden take the hit on all price increases at the pump? I think, I agree with Jay. It's just a matter of time before the Republicans are gonna use this as a wedge issue in the upcoming election. They're gonna, right now they're all supporting his... Does that seem patriotic to you? It's been turned into a kind of a patriotic event. Yes, in that sense, yeah, I think so. Because both sides are, at least in Congress seem to be on board. In fact, they gave him, I've got how many billions of dollars, but the Congress increased even what he asked for. This is to send to Ukraine. So I think it's very political, but the other side of it is this inflation area issue, which is going to mean that from what I've read, they're predicting the gas prices are going up to over $5 a gallon. And this is a key issue, I think, particularly in the Midwest where a lot of people drive long distances to go to work. So in cities, there's other ways, other kinds of transportation, but also, so I think that that could become a key issue in the election, the fact the higher gas prices, even though it's a double-edged sword, right now they're supporting it. But if Ness, we've been living in a cave for the last few years, we know they can turn on a dime and then switch it the other direction. Well, okay, maybe it's just me, but once, and the polls certainly support what you're saying is 70, 80% of Americans support some kind of oil embargo from Russia because they're in agreement and support of Ukraine. But it just seems to me more than hypocritical, it seems unpatriotic to support an action and then two weeks later, because the news cycle is changing or drones on, they changed their minds. And I don't know if I'm used to that. I guess that's how things are today. Your thoughts about that? Well, we're just thinking of the Supreme Court sitting there right now, hearing a case that's gonna disempower the EPA to regulate climate change. And from what I'm reading, they're about to do so. So talk about hypocrisy. People think climate change is a number one issue and we're still fighting over fossil fuels. Maybe this would be a good chance for Biden to rally around the green flag and say we're gonna start as a country mass producing green products rather than worry about the oil again. I'm reminded of the movie, Don't Look Up. That's all I can say to your comment. Thank you, Karen. I do have one other question is, what other additional sanctions should the United States consider against Russia other than what we've done? There are some articles in today's paper about, in fact, President Biden took executive steps about cryptocurrencies and how Russia can avoid a lot of these sanctions by the use of cryptocurrencies. Well, it seems like we've gone about as far as we can go for now till we see the impact because it's not so much, I think the US that will be impacted by Europe because they pay a higher price for, they use more Russian oil and also another major product that's being banned is wheat and also they get a lot of their wheat production from Russia and formerly Ukraine. So I guess the question is how much of our policies will come back to bite us in the face if we need to kind of see what the impact is on Europe and ourselves. Okay. Jason, question to you. What additional sanctions either the government or non-government entities? We have Coca-Cola, we have McDonald's, Starbucks and Visa who have voluntarily pulled out their business from Russia. What other sanctions in your mind do you think are worthwhile? I got an email last night with a list of all the American companies or notable American companies, big American companies that had not pulled out of Russia. And so to the extent that he has jaw-boned, these few popular brand companies, mostly food I think, at least the ones you listed, there's a lot of them that have not been jaw-boned. They haven't responded to him. So I think I would do that. I would go to all those companies, I'd make a telephone call or have my staff make a telephone call and say, hey, how about it? Because if you don't do this, we are going to make this list really public, you're gonna look terrible. And if you wanna have a friend in a White House, you better listen to me. Now that's leadership, that has happened before. Unfortunately, I don't think the country really believes most people in the country are a great number of the people in the country don't believe that Ukraine matters. Doesn't matter that we are observing all these deaths every day. It doesn't give them a sense of urgency that we blow up maternity hospitals with hundreds of babies killed. I just don't understand that. It's like, we don't care, let's retrench into isolation and nationalism. That's where we really like to be. You know, it reminds me of World War II. If, let me ask you a rhetorical question. If FDR hadn't gotten up there and called it the day of infamy, if the Japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbor, would we have had, would we have been involved in that war? Not then, not then, nobody wanted it. There were a lot of pro-German sympathizers on the mainland that were advocating against any war with Germany. And nobody really cared about a war with Japan. It was too far away. If the Japanese and Yamamoto's big mistake was bombing Pearl Harbor because they got us involved. Now, there's no event like that right now. Ukraine is half a world away. That's where we are. And it costs money. It's gonna cost inflation, price of gas, all kinds of pain in our economy. And I don't think he's got the US convinced of that. And the GOP is not gonna help him convince the US of that. So over time, mark my words, connected dots a week or two away on this very show, Tim and Karen, we're gonna be talking about how the unanimity of the US, the bilateral, what am I looking for? Bipartisan feeling about Ukraine to support Ukraine is going to dissipate. Furthermore, the same show, we should also talk about the solidarity in Europe because there are indications that the solidarity in Europe is also dissipating. And part of that is that Biden is being chicken about the Polish jets. And I think that has a very undermining effect on Poland and other countries in NATO. He's being chicken. He's really not bellying up to it. I mean, you have all these people dying. What do they have to say? Zelenski speaks for them and they are dying by the car loan. The country is being wrecked into rubble and we are having silly conversations. Are you, we've talked earlier, are you convinced we're in a Neville Chamberlain moment? Yes. With Ukraine? Yes. If you take a look at this carefully, that's exactly what you see. You know, I reminded of Churchill to say, it's very difficult to negotiate when your head is in the mouth of the tiger and or so many words he said that. And it seems to me that negotiating later with Putin is going to be much more difficult that if we basically provide more apathy to this issue. Now, we have undersecretary of state, her name was Victoria Newland. And she said with the boycott of Russian oil to the United States and other countries doing the same, we've taken off 70% of revenue off the table for Russia. Do you buy that? Hasn't stopped them. The threat of it didn't stop them. The de facto action on it over the past week hasn't stopped him. And he has to double down. It doesn't take time for these things to sink in. Will the Russian people, I mean, it's been said that the information that they receive is like state TV. The only get what they're told. Internet has been shut down. News services have been shut down. Other than mouth to mouth from relative to relative, people really don't know what's going on. I mean, they know what's going on as they're being told, but they're not necessarily hearing the truth of the situation. But doesn't the fact that all these things are happening indicate that something's amiss, something's not true that Putin is telling them. And don't you think the Russian people will react to that once they know what the truth is? Or are they apathetic as Americans are apathetic? Some of them are apathetic. Some of them understand what's going on. They see the indicators around them and others just listens to state TV. I think the larger body of Russians just listens to state TV. And they buy what he's saying that Putin is involved in a war against Nazis, which is a, what am I looking for? It's a stop the steal kind of lie. It's what it is. Stop the steal kind of lie. And he repeats it and all his staff repeats it and state TV repeats it. And after a while it sinks into the nether and everybody believes it or at least the people who watch state TV because they have nothing else to watch. Now, if you're looking for me to say that the Russian people are gonna rise up, they're not. This is not a democracy. It hasn't been a democracy. It doesn't have a democratic history or culture. They're not gonna rise up. It's not gonna be 1917 all over again. It is not. And what I believe is gonna happen is that he is gonna scare anybody who wants to protest out of the country. They're gonna leave. All right. And the result is everybody will be quiet about it. And he'll have his way. Now, in terms of having his way, his group of advisers is smaller and smaller. And what you get is Putin does what Putin wants to do. He's pathological. He's a wild man, as much as any great dictator in the 20th century was. And it doesn't care. In fact, he intends to level the population and the infrastructure of the Ukraine for his own reasons and maybe set up a new border that looks west to the rest of NATO and then see what he can do from there. But he is not gonna stop. And every time we impose some sort of sanction, he finds countermeasures and or ignores it or doubles down on his murder. So I don't know if there's any rosy side to this. Okay. Thank you, Jay. Karen, I'm gonna veer off a little bit off the oil embargo topic and go to what Jay is suggesting that Putin is not satisfied with just Ukraine and certainly not satisfied with Kev and Odessa that he has other goals in mind. He seems to be again, you know, saber-rattling about nuclear weapons. And Russia doesn't seem to have a 25th Amendment. Jay suggests that the Russian people really won't go out in the streets and stand unified against Putin. And because he's a dictator, there is no democracy. What about the power structure around Putin? If he really starts to threaten nuclear weapons as a means to an end, do you foresee them stepping in at some point, even though they don't have a 25th Amendment process? Well, I suppose the power structure are the oligarchs that surround them because, and can I prop them up? So in that sense, I don't- He's happy to jail them at a snap of a finger. He's far and happy to just put them in jail. That's true. I mean, he has certain oligarchs who just put them in jail, but did you, I just saw recently, and if you saw this in the paper where the US just took the property of some oligarch here in US, took it away and sold it to Jeff Bezos at some, you know, at discount price. It was some island of the state of New York or something. So I thought that was sort of interesting that A that well, not so much they would take it away, but they would just immediately sell it to Jeff Bezos. And the other thing I noticed, you know, I think that should be part of this discussion is they were saying last night that the, even though the stock market is tanking for most of us, the defense stocks are going through the roof right now. So, and actually Congress people are starting to buy, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars of defense stocks because they realize the war is going to be profitable for them. Yeah, how do you spell insider trading? Yeah, so much for my topic last week, which was stop insider trading for Congress. Oh, well, I guess timing is everything, isn't it Karen? Marjorie Taylor Greene herself, but thousands of, I don't know how much, but you know, stock in, I think North or Gundram or whatever they're called. Yeah. Okay, so let's just assume that the Russian population is not getting the truth due to the fact that social media has been blocked and news services have been basically threatened and they've shuttered up and they're not going to be reporting. So you only have state TV. How does the word get out to the Russian people about what's really happening in Ukraine and the war crimes that are happening in Ukraine? There's an article about VPNs, you know, VPNs are popular in China, they get by the government, get by the censors. Explain VPN. It's a virtual private network and it allows you to connect to internet and social media even though the government is blocking it. So that's becoming popular, but it's only with the literati. Most people don't know what it means, they don't have it, they can't get it, they couldn't use it, but there are certain people in Russia who are akamai about that and are doing that. I don't think it's enough. I don't think it's a tipping point. I think what we have here is a, he's using every weapon, every propaganda weapon he can use and he's using every punishment weapon he can use. It's not lost on anybody that if you protest, you get beaten up, put in jail and sent to a faraway place. Maybe that has radioactive food. It's scary and they're scared. Fear is a fundamental point in a communist regime. So I think he's gonna be able to control the people. I think he's gonna be able to control the oligarchs, the group around him, they just, in his bubble, they do whatever he tells them and he's making these decisions and he's pathological. So that is not, to me, that is not a notable dynamic. The dynamic we have to watch for is Biden and the GOP and the Senate, all those dynamics and that's happening here. And that will have a huge effect on the solidarity in Europe. And for that matter, American rhetoric at least and maybe American action in Europe. Kieran to Jay's point, if the Senate and the House do not overwhelmingly support Biden's boycott of Russian oil, will Putin look at that as Biden's out on an island by himself and further be emboldened to do what he pleases? He might, yes, but I also want to point out that I saw where politicians on both sides of the aisle are now predicting that the Democrats can possibly pull out control of the Senate, not the House, the Senate, because of the bump in his ratings, which are, I think in the 40s now, the 30s earlier. 47, remarkable like 10 points in the space of a week, but let me add that that is clearly a function of his quote, end quote, leadership in the Ukrainian affair and to the extent that he is exposed for being too strong or too weak. And I would favor, I would characterize it as too weak myself in the Ukrainian affair. He could lose that 10 points overnight. They could take it off. He got it overnight, so he could lose it overnight. I agree with that statement, Jay. Karen, continue, please. Oh, so yeah, so I think that if he, you know, the next election coming up, I think if he can keep kind of the support, there's a chance, you know, that we didn't have that we being, I'm a Democrat, didn't have before in terms of maybe pulling out the Senate because the question is how much Republicans are going to turn against him before the election. So... Okay, we've run out of time. So Karen, I'm going to give it to you, the floor to you for your last thoughts on anything, if you wish. It doesn't have to be about the oil embargo. It could be on anything. What's your last thought? Well, my last thought is I think there needs to be kind of an investigation of Congress and their relation to the defense industry because it seems, you know, kind of very unfair that here the people that are making the decisions about who's going to war and the weapons and so forth are benefiting from those same decisions. I think President Eisenhower had a final speech about the military industrial complex and that was in the 50s. So... That's true. Not a lot has changed, but I would agree with you. I absolutely would agree with you. Jay, your last thoughts. Our two thoughts. First thought is to Karen's point, there's no reason why you and me and anybody down the street can't buy defense stocks right now. And if you have any concern about what is going on in Europe, if you do worry about World War III buy defense stocks. And that's what these guys are doing the insider trading in Congress will say, hey, it was obvious we don't have control so much as we see as you see in the newspaper things are not getting better. But the point I want to make, my second point is that while we are all distracted with all these things we've been talking about, I go to Karen's point also about, or was it your point, Tim, that there may be signs that Congress because of Biden's new popularity that the Democrats may take the Senate or the House or Maine, but I don't think so. There was an article in the New Yorker two or three days ago where they outlined that it was like a magic trick. In this hand, we have all these things going on and all this Ukraine stuff, but in this hand behind my back, I am working very hard to scuttle fair voting in this country. And this article just went through all the things that GOP is doing and will do between now and election day. They screw up the voting system every which way. So many there was an article this morning about some woman in Colorado. She is running for Secretary of State in Colorado and she's been indicted for manipulating, actually manipulating voting information. I mean, that's really felonious criminal. So the GOP has been really busy right now and it's going to be busy. It's going to be busy making laws in all those states. It's going to be busy finding ways to make voting into a divisive and racist experience. And the prediction of that article was there's no way that we're going to have free and fair voting in November. So and I agree with that. Take a look at the article you'll see. And so I think that whatever happens in Ukraine, it is very unlikely that the Democrats will succeed either in the House or the Senate in November. Alrighty, that pretty much wraps it up. I'm going to just finish. You said something that caught my ire. And that is, you know, I call it money for misery. Trade on the military stocks as a former bond portfolio manager for the feds and private bank. I saw these things happen where profits were made on times of misery. And I always referred to them as ghoulish trades. And I'll continue with that terminology. I agree with you. And notice I did not say that you should buy these stocks. That's correct. I only said that you could buy these stocks. You did not say you should. That is correct. And I'm glad you made that distinction, Jay. But to the brave people of Ukraine and to the brave people who are fighting in the streets. And as Zelensky said in the forests and on the streets and the riverbanks, we wish them our support and we wish them our prayers. And one more point. It's about time they got the Polish jets. To me, that's the most important issue on the table. Let's not fool around, no more chicken. Let's just get the Polish jets to them right now. I agree, Jay. If they can get stingers, they can get jets. So we agree on that. So join us next week. But before I say join us next week, I'd like to say thank you to Jay Fiedel and Karen Buzzard. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your insightful comments. Join us next week, Wednesday at 11 o'clock for What Now America? And I'm Tim Appichell, your host, and we'll see you then. Aloha. Mahalo.