 But you know since Congressman Paul left Congress, his impact on that institution remains at least slightly in the form of Thomas Massey and some other members of Congress. Now Thomas Massey like Ron came to Congress a little differently, a little more circuitous route. He represents the 4th District of Kentucky which I believe runs up close to the Ohio and Cincinnati and contains some of those suburbs. And I don't want to say all members of Congress but unlike many members of Congress, Thomas Massey was smart. And he went to MIT and was an engineer there and he actually created a company there while he was still a student along with his wife also an engineer. They had some very successful technology which they later raised some venture capital for and sold. So he's been in the business world. He's certainly been in the tech world. He's an entrepreneurial thinker and a very storied engineer in his own right. But most importantly for our purposes today, he's really I would say the most pro-liberty and pro-peace member of Congress who's carrying on Ron Paul Spanner. And we're so grateful that he can make time for us today so please a warm welcome for Thomas Massey. Well he mentioned that I went to MIT and that's where I took my first formal economics classes and I took microeconomics. And I absolutely loved it. But then I signed up for this macroeconomics class. And on the first day I went and there was this young associate professor who gave us his office number and his office hours for the class. And it was only about ten years later when I figured out why I hated macroeconomics at MIT. It's because the professor was Paul Krugman. So I didn't buy what he was selling when I was a sophomore at MIT and I'm not buying it now. But that's not why I came here to speak. I came here to tell you about some things maybe you don't see in the news, maybe questions you have that only somebody in Congress could answer. And the first one that I want to talk about is this notion that we've been notified that, you know, oh, we notified Congress before we did this. Folks, I'm still waiting on my notification. The Russians were notified. I wasn't notified. So this notion that you could call the speaker of the house and just say, hey, we're going to commit an act of war. Are you good with that? Oh, yeah, I'm good with that. The notion that that's notification of Congress is bad. It's false. And there are a lot of reasons why this should have come before Congress. The first of which is that's the only constitutional way to wage a war is the executive branch has to come to Congress to get that authority constitutionally. But there's a lot of other good practical reasons. Who's going to fund this damn war? Right? Who's going to vote on those appropriations bills? Actually, they're going to be omnibus bills. It's going to be one giant 2000 page bill that's got another hundred million dollars to replace the stockpile of missiles from Raytheon that were expended three days ago. So that's the other good reason that you need to come to Congress. Somebody's going to have to write the check. And then I could go down the list. This seems like a movie that I've watched before in 2013. So literally the months that Ron Paul left Congress, I came into Congress. And not long thereafter, Obama said that Assad had crossed the red line, a bright red line, and that we had to attack Assad for using chemical weapons. And this was during the August timeframe, September timeframe. We came back from our August recess. Folks, there's only one issue that I've ever received more phone calls into my office in four and a half years, more phone calls than the Obamacare light bill recently. And it was in 2013 when Obama said, let's go to war. And Boehner said, we're good with that. Pelosi said, we're good with that. And Obama said, and he was probably just hedging this because he knew it was not that popular and he wanted to cover his bases. It's not that he thought it was constitutional, the constitutional thing to do or that he wanted to abide by the Constitution. Because in fact, he said, really, I think I've got the authority to do this, but I'm just to get your input. I'm going to come to Congress to get your buy off. And what happened is for about a week, this authorization for use of military force festered in Congress. The neocons thought that it didn't go far enough. But really the people that called my office, 100 phone calls a day. And that's a lot of phone calls. On average, you get about 10. 100 phone calls a day, 99 to 1. Actually, it was 100 to nothing in the first few days. And I went in the news and said, there's not a single person that called in favor of this war in Syria. This was in 2013. Well, then in the third day, we got a call. Somebody was in favor of it. And they said, well, why do you support it? He said, well, I heard the congressman say nobody was for it. So I thought somebody should call on the other side. So anyways, that was in 2013. And they never had the vote. They never took the vote. And here's why, because it was so unpopular. And it would have failed miserably. And then Obama, he would have lost the mandate for what he did next. I mean, he never had a mandate, but he would have been prevented from what he did next, which is according to the Washington Post, because I can't tell you what I know, but according to the Washington Post, we commence to spending a billion dollars a year on a secret war in Syria, funneling weapons and money to so-called moderate rebels at a billion dollars a year. That's going to leave a mark in a civil war. But that's what, according to the Washington Post, has happened there. And it's not made things any better at all. I want to talk about some other areas of foreign policy, because I'm sure this will dominate today the air strikes in Syria, but Afghanistan, for instance, speaking of writing the check, who's going to write the check? We are writing checks hand over fist to prop up Afghanistan and rebuild their infrastructure. We have spent a hundred billion dollars, and this is according to the Inspector General, who's in charge of all of this, overseeing all of the money that's going into Afghanistan, John Sopko, Special Inspector General. Mr. Jones and I have had him in hearings, we've had him in our office, and he's trying to blow the whistle on the waste, fraud, and abuse of all this money, even if you wanted to build Afghanistan's infrastructure. And we're on the hook, by the way, for another 10 billion. So this is going to be an interesting thing going forward if this year does Trump ask us to quit spending money on the infrastructure in Afghanistan, because that doesn't seem like putting America first. But here's just an example of what some of that money goes to. We built a hydroelectric dam there. Now, there was a lot of talk about it getting blown up by the Taliban, and you never hear about that anymore. Do you wonder why the Taliban's not trying to blow up the hydroelectric dam anymore? They're getting the electricity. They get 30 percent. It's a deal that's been cut over there. We're paying the light bill for the Taliban now. I think it's 30 percent of the electricity in exchange for not blowing it up, or shooting the operators who are operating the dam. In Afghanistan, we spent $8 billion on a war on drugs in Afghanistan alone, and they have doubled production of opium since we started spending $8 billion. And there's no results to show for it even if you wanted results. I asked the inspector general, I said, we got this stuff in Kentucky called Roundup. Could you spray that on those poppy plants? He said, yeah. I said, would it kill it? He said, oh, yeah, there's several herbicides. Herbicides are very effective. I said, why don't we do that? He said, because it'd be far too effective. You have to decimate their crops. And then, again, you'd have the Taliban upset, and it would destabilize everything because, by the way, the Taliban used to prevent people from growing poppy. But now that we've degraded that country so much, I mean that they now support it, and it's the source of their income. And so that's one of the reasons we don't take it out. Let me talk about another area of spending for war where we keep writing the check and I hope Donald Trump looks at this. We talk about all the Russian interference. Oh my gosh, they're sending propaganda here, and it's causing our voters to go crazy and vote this way or that way. We have two programs. These are relics of the Cold War era, actually relics of World War II and before. Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, and then other versions of that in other countries. How much do you think we spend on that a year? This shocked me. On our own propaganda, state-run propaganda, I'm not talking about CNN, $750 million a year, and nobody in Congress is asking about that check, but they'll go on TV and castigate the Russians for spending money on getting their message out or on their propaganda. Let me tell you one of the solutions. So there are constitutionalists in Congress. There are people that have some major cognitive dissonance going on. They're writing the checks for this stuff that they know these wars that have been started or waged unconstitutionally, and they want to abide by the Constitution. They ran on that platform. So behind closed doors every week, we have a GOP conference meeting, and in that there's no media. Even our staff is not allowed in that meeting. Leadership staff is. So here's some really interesting ideas there. One of them was proposed by a rigid constitutionalist, strong conservative, I'm not going to out him, but he was concerned that if Obama wanted to go to war with Iran, it would take us too long to decide. Yet he didn't want him to go to war with Iran without Congress's approval. His proposal was that we pre-declare war in the event that Obama ever decided, woke up one morning and decided that we should be in war. It would already be pre-declared, and this would save us the hassle and the time and the delays. So that's the kind of thinking that's going on. I mean, he wants to be constitutional, right? He realizes that's the clear text of the Constitution requires approval, but it doesn't say you can't just pre-approve it. So he wants to pre-approve it. I also had somebody get up last year in conference and slam the desk at the podium and say, we need more money for the military. We have been bombing so much for so long that our stockpiles are dangerously low. And it felt like I was in a cartoon. Our stockpiles are dangerously low. We've been bombing for so long and our stockpiles are dangerously low. We need to up the appropriations for the military. So anyways, these are the kind of things that you hear behind the curtain that I just wish were in public view. Very quickly, I want to talk about my concern. One of my concerns about this strike that we just had is that Donald Trump's poll numbers go back up. And because he's more than a populist, there's nobody that responds to popular opinion that day or in that group of 30,000 people who are clapping at what he says. And if he doesn't get booed pretty soon in one of those events with 30,000 people, either for supporting Obamacare Light or for committing an act of war without congressional approval, if somebody doesn't boo him, he's going to think this is the right thing to do. And I don't know where the next strike would be. Maybe it would be in North Korea. And that concerns me gravely. So in fact, if the government of North Korea were to lay down their arms tomorrow and just quit, they just walked away from it, you've got 25 million kept people, 25 million people that are basically almost all of them on the equivalent of Medicaid and food stamps, right? South Korea is 50 million people. They don't want North Korea. They don't want to annex that, even if the government of North Korea left. I mean, it would be like East Germany and the European Union or East Germany and West Germany on steroids, like multiply it times 100. We'd probably be asking the Chinese to feed North Korea if their government collapsed tomorrow. Some would want to pay that check. But anyways, that's a problem there. And so I hope that popular opinion does weigh on this. By the way, people are... I would say our government in D.C. is guilty of a lack of imagination right now, and they always have been. So we can fully now grasp that terrorists in the desert were able to commandeer four jets, commercial airliners, 19 people, take down both towers of the World Trade Center. They're that sophisticated, that far ahead thinking to be able to do that. Yet it's beyond our imagination that somebody might have set something up in Syria to drag us into the war. Which of those is more sophisticated of an operation? To drag the U.S. into the war in Syria by making something look like it wasn't? And by the way, I think the truth is first casualty of war. The truth is unobtainable now in that area. I don't know how... I mean, I'm sure we are in overdrive creating our own evidence and the Russians are in overdrive creating their own evidence and the rebels are creating their evidence. Who knows what the story, what the facts will be? So anyways, those are just a few things that I wanted to talk about that are behind the scenes in Congress, some things that you may not hear about in the news. And I wanted to leave you with this. As I said, I walked in the day that the month that Ron Paul walked out and I knew... I studied that some members of Congress they go to drain the swamp and swamp drains them. And what I realized is it's really important how you pick your staff because each congressman has 16 staffers roughly and they really are your policy. You have very little time. It's like standing in front of a tennis ball machine trying to keep up with all the issues that are coming across your plate. So your staff is really the one that's going to field these. So I decided it was very important to pick the right staff. And I wanted a diverse staff. If you don't have any arguments in your office, Daniel can tell you this, and if you don't have any arguments in your office, then you may just lock in on the wrong answer too soon. So I decided to get a diverse staff. Half of my staff are Ron Paul people and the other half are Rand Paul people. So we have great arguments every day. Thank you very much.