Not Understanding History and the Mistakes of Doing That (Transcript)

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Hi, this is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today brought to you by theplaintruth.com.

In the 1990s when I was working for another paint company before I started my own with my wife, we were a part of a company that ended up selling to another company, I won’t mention any names, but they’re out of business. I was working for a specific type of paint company, which I still am today, with our own company, it was automotive paint.

2:34 Now when most people think of a paint company, they may think of the paint they use at their house like a latex paint or an oil-based paint. Most people do not paint their own cars, they take it to someone else to do, but there’s quite a few, you know, people out there that still do paint their own cars. But the company that bought us out was an industrial paint company and they had no experience at all with the automotive paint world. And when they took us over, they were very arrogant and they said we’re going to show the automotive paint companies of the world how to run a paint company because what we see, you guys don’t know how to run a company. And when they bought us out, we were doing about $16 million a year in 1988, I guess it would be, and I’ll tell you that story in a minute. They were about a $100 million paint company, but they were going to show companies like PPG that was a $4 billion paint company at the time, and DuPont which was about a $9 billion paint company at the time, and Sherwin-Williams which was about a $3.5 to $4 billion paint company at the time.

4:01 They were going to show them the right way to do things and that they were not going to follow the procedures. And when you’re in the automotive paint business, because you’re producing product that doesn’t cost that much more than house paint to make, but you sell it for 50 times more money than house paint, you have to have a lot of bells and whistles for the customers and for the people using it, and for the body shops, and you have all kinds of programs, and you do all kinds of things that do not make business sense. However, which I knew at the time, if you did not do those kind of things, you would not have any customers because they are very spoiled.A automotive paint customer is a very spoiled individual. And if you’re going to try to re-educate how they’re going to act, and how they’re going to buy, and what they’re going to do, you got a big road ahead of you. I’m making a point here.So they bought us out and they took the company from $16 million to the next year it was $9 million. The next year it was $7 million, and I was $5 million of the $7 million in sales, by the way. My sales were not falling because I knew what I was doing.And pretty soon they found themselves running out of business, and they themselves ended up selling us to PPG, who ended up shutting us down. They just bought it to shut it down. And then they themselves got bought out by Valspar, which since has been bought out by Sherwin Williams.Everybody, you know, one little fish eats a bigger fish, eats a bigger fish, and a bigger fish eats it, and a bigger fish eats that. And finally you have five paint companies left. But anyway, this idea that you’re going to go in and you’re going to train people your way, and you’re going to show people the right way to do something when you’re dealing with a profession that is 70, 80 years old, like the automotive paint business was, you want to know what? You’re not going to succeed.

6:56 Well, that’s about like someone deciding that they’re going to run for president, and they’re going to decide to reinvent the entire world economic system. They’re going to, they’re going to, by their own fiat, by their own arrogance, or their own will, they’re going to show the world the right way to do things. And they’re going to go, and they’re going to take on billionaires and trillion-dollar countries, and they’re going to reinvent the world order of business.Well, there is a scene from the movie Network I’m going to play right now, and it’s a scene where someone thought he was going to be the populist of the day, and he was going, he was a newscaster, and his own boss. Think of Bill O’Reilly as a newscaster, and think of Mr. Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, as the person going to be giving this speech right now. But there’s a point I’m going to, so I’m going to play this in about two seconds.You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Neal, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? Do you think you’ve merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations.There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs.There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and inane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.Petrodollars, electrodollars, multidollars, Reichmarks, rings, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. 

That is the natural order of things today.

8:21 That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! And you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl, democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the names. What do you think the Russians talk about in their council of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. Well, I don’t want the world to be a business, and I really want the things that Donald Trump talked about happening with America, trying to make America great again, and all of these things. But there’s some accuracy to that movie, and I’m sorry for the people who don’t know business. But it’s going to be very hard for one person, one person and one nation even, even as big as the United States, to change the order of things in this world. And the order of things in this world is global. And like it or not, we can either be a part of this global world, or we can be not a part of this global world. But if we’re not a part of this global world, you will not have coffee to drink, you will not have bananas to eat, you will not have many things today you take for granted. You will be paying $4,000 for a TV, you’ll be paying four or five thousand extra dollars for the car you want to buy, and it won’t be as good as the one you have today. You will find yourself paying three, four times for the gasoline that you’re buying. You will find out you’re paying two to three more times for your electricity bill at home.

You will find out there are so many things that you depend on other countries to get. And the last thing you really want to do is make those countries your enemies, where they do not want to buy from you or sell to you. And that is what is called a trade war. And a trade war is unwinnable. In fact, most trade wars lead to world wars, because after a while, people, when they can’t get what they want, order their president or their leader or their king or whoever to go get it. In a way, we almost see that when Donald Trump is saying we’re going to just take Greenland if they don’t give it to us.

That sounds a little tyrannical to me.

And the idea that we’re going to take over the Panama Canal because China’s there, we’re going to take over Greenland because we need it. Even though Greenland is the possession of Denmark, a fellow member of NATO with a clause in NATO that an attack on one is an attack on all, which means every single European country would have to go to war with the United States.

10:02 And you might say, oh, we could beat every war, every country in the world. We could beat Europe with our hands tied behind our back. We’re the most powerful country on the face of the Earth. Well, in a way, I think that is what Vladimir Putin said when he went into Ukraine. I’ll have this country in three weeks. Well, two years later, he doesn’t have that country yet. Eventually, he’s going to win the war, but it’s going to cost him maybe a million, a million and a half of his own people’s lives in order to get it. And when he gets it, he’s not going to have anything there worth having because it’ll all be destroyed. And for the Ukrainians fighting, thinking they can win this war, they’re about as bent politically and mentally as Vladimir Putin is or the West that thought that we could prop up a little country like Ukraine and keep the Russians from invading them or stop them from taking them over. But the point is, do we want to face that kind of brutal? Do you want to see your city destroyed? Do you want to see people dying in the streets? Do you want to see no pharmaceuticals coming to America because we won’t have the pharmaceuticals ready in time if a plague hits because we’re at war with a country that makes all the pharmaceuticals in the world? Are we prepared for what the MAGA people, the ones that I call ever-Trumpers, just doesn’t seem to realize? And they don’t realize that the problem with their thought process is they don’t know what they’re talking about. They absolutely are just making up things as they go.

We see this even with this person that was deported to El Salvador. He was a member of MS-13 or so they claim. But when they do court filings for this guy, they can’t prove it. They say the New York Times said this, the New York Post said this, the Wall Street Journal said this. Well, as one lawyer that I was listening to on TV mentioned, he’s never seen a court brief by a prosecutor, even an idiotic prosecutor that relied on newspaper stories. I thought that was called the fake news by this administration. Now we’re going to start quoting the fake news to prove this guy was a terrorist when it doesn’t look like he was at all.

13:58 And then we have reports. We have this on the Plain Truth, by the way, if you go to the Message Board. And I do say right now, I’ll take a little commercial during this show to say the Plain Truth Message Board, and it goes back to 2008, December of 2008.

It actually started on Tammy and I, my wife and I anniversary in 2008. And we have on that this week, two United States citizens, supposedly in error, have been contacted by ICE and told to self-deport themselves and or they will be arrested and deported. That’s what the letter said. Unfortunately for ICE, these two people are American citizens, not immigrants that gained their citizenship. They were born and raised here one over 38 years ago and one over 40 years ago, born to American parents and on American soil. And we have ICE like the Keystone cops saying they’re going to be deported. And then they say, oh, it was a mistake. You’re going to make a mistake like that, but you’re going to go to court and you’re going to swear that this person was an MS-13 gang member when you can’t even prove it. And then it turns out when some investigation into this person goes on, he has never been arrested in the United States. Never. I’ve never heard of a gang member never being arrested in the United States. Furthermore, he had a work permit to work in the United States. And because he was an illegal alien, the Trump administration had to write to deport him to about 183 countries if they wanted to. The court specifically said, because he was here trying to seek asylum, that he could not be deported to El Salvador because he would be killed. But they could deport him to 183 or so other countries in the world. But this administration decided to not listen to the judge, to show contempt for the judicial system of this country and send him to the only country in the world they were told they could not send this man to.

5:01 If you don’t have a problem with this, and I talk to people all day long, the ever-Trumpers I call them, that Trump, you know, walks next to Jesus and everything he does and can do no wrong. Well, I got news for you. We were kind of upset with what happened to the January 6th people when their due process was denied. Now we’re going to do the same thing to other people that may not be guilty, or we’re going to even do it to American citizens that were born and raised here, to American parents like for the fourth or fifth generation. And nobody has a problem with that but me. I’m the only person who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and voted for Donald Trump in 2024, who had all the hopes in the world that this man would turn around what Joe Biden started, the demise of this country. And actually, what he’s doing in some of these programs that he’s doing, he’s adding to the uncertainty of the world. He’s going to train the world on how to get America back on top again and the world’s going to have to…

He’s got this plan.

You know, I have a problem when a person has a plan and no one knows what the plan is, number one, or that the plan is just based on stupidity and not understanding how the world works. I don’t like the globalist world. I really wish we could go back to where we were a hundred years ago, but you know what? We’re not going to go back to where we were a hundred years ago unless we blow ourselves to tarnation with nuclear bombs.We are in a global world. We learned this, I thought, in the 1930s when the American public, 96% of the American public, did not want to enter into a war if it broke out in Europe called World War II because of what they perceived, which they were accurate, that World War I was a war that America should have never entered. They should have listened to George Washington who said, stay out of European wars, stay out of European affairs, because all world wars begin in Europe, and they do and they will.

17:05 For years, America put the Monroe Doctrine into place where we took the whole northern-south hemisphere, the United States and the Americas, and said, Europe, stay away. It’s our territory. We won’t go into your world. You don’t go into our world. And that worked for America until we became a superpower and until the invention of the steamship, and then later on the airplane, and then the world got smaller. And when the 1930s rolled around and FDR, and I’m not a big FDR fan, he was an American patriot. Yes, I think he was a socialist. I know he was a socialist, maybe even a communist, I don’t know. But I didn’t like a lot of the things he did, and I certainly didn’t like the way he went around things, but he was an American patriot.

18:02 No American general was ever under any Allied generals in World War II. We ran both shows in the Pacific and the Atlantic. But what I wanted to get to was FDR realized by 1935, because he used to be the Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, something I don’t think many people know, and he understood how the world had become smaller, and that the nations of Japan and Germany were dangerous, and they were bent on conquering the known world like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, right, or Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible. And he understood that America had to stay strong, and eventually it would also have to help what we would consider our allies, mainly Great Britain, and to a lesser extent at the time, France. And he saw what was coming, and when he would go to Congress and try to appropriate money to build new battleships, because the battleships that we were using in the 1930s and early into the 1940s were built before World War I. They were so antiquated that if they ever went to war, they would be knocked out of the sea by stuff like the Bismarck, the German battleship, and 20 seconds like the HMS Hood was in the first battle between the Hood and the Bismarck, it lasted about five minutes, and one shell from the Bismarck penetrated the Hood, the biggest battleship that the British had, again built before World War I, and it exploded and everyone basically died. I think there was maybe 20, 30 survivors. 20:21 Thousands died on that battleship because it was just inferior to the German technology of the Bismarck. You have to learn from history or you are going to repeat history.

I say this over and over and over again, and we’re not learning from our history, unfortunately, and so we think we’re going to be able to go back to America where we don’t need the world, we don’t need the products. Well, here’s some facts you may or may not know. I’ve given these facts in the past shows, but we’ll put them all together right now in the last 10 minutes of this show. Fact number one, we need rare earth minerals. We’re threatening to invade Greenland and make a deal with Ukraine in order to get these rare earth materials. What no one’s telling you is that 80 to 90 percent of all of these rare earth materials have to be refined, and the only place that can refine them today is China. As a matter of fact, the rare earth materials that we dig up in America, and mainly in only Utah, I believe it’s Utah and California, we have to export those to China so they can refine them and send them back to us. We don’t have one, not one refiner for rare earth materials in America. There’s just one example. Another example, I told you this before, 75 percent of all the gasoline that is refined in America is refined only from Canadian shale oil. It cannot use West Texas crude, it cannot use the Gulf oil, it cannot use oil from Saudi Arabia or the North Atlantic. The refineries would have to be retrofitted in order to do so, probably take a year or two. So if we’re going to put a tariff and Canada decides not to sell us their oil, we are out of gas. So your $3 gas, by the way, you notice the gas price did not come down day one, like was promised, because of the talk of these tariffs. Now you would be paying $9 a gallon for gas if we were boycotted by Canada, because there would be no gas. There would be long lines like there was in the 1970s.

20:05 Is anybody my age and remember the 1970s? Odd, even days when you could get gas, you could get up to 10 gallons at a time when you could get gas and at the time you had to wait in a line that was probably two to three hours long, two to three miles down the street from the gas station. Does anybody, I know the younger people don’t even know this, they just go to a gas station, pay the price and they’re mad if they have to wait for one car to leave because all the gas pumps are filled. Well, how would you like to go where all the gas pumps are filled for four miles back? The line is four miles long. Well, that could happen because we depend on Canadian oil for our gas today. That wasn’t even the case in the 1970s. We could use Saudi Arabian oil in the 1970s. Our refineries were geared for that, but they got changed because of the boycott of not wanting to use Middle Eastern oil because of the Gulf Wars and stuff like that. Things that people making decisions maybe do not know. 

For example, microchips.

We are trying to bring back microchip processes back to America, but the majority of the microchips are still being made in Taiwan. Well, if Taiwan gets taken over by China because China decides this is the time to invade, if we’re going to be in a trade war, we may as well be in a world war, then our military is going to be in trouble when they need to refit things and they need microchips. Again, all of these things we want to do is going to take years for us to build.

22:23 Now, I told you last week that I was going to come up with a show, and I’ll probably do so in the next few days, my plan on what should have been done. I think when I explain it, I think anybody that’s just not an ever-Trumper, that Donald Trump can do no wrong, he’s got this master plan, he’s got it all figured out because he’s the greatest genius that has ever walked the face of the earth. This great genius lost in 2020. Maybe that was stolen from him, as I believe, but he allowed it to happen. This great genius had COVID happen on his watch, and he put Dr. Fauci in charge, the person who killed or maimed two to three million people around the world because of his idiocy and his greed. Yes, Dr. Fauci’s greed because he owns the patents on all these vaccines that people are getting. I don’t think people even know that. I don’t know if Donald Trump knew that when he put Dr. Fauci’s in charge and let him shut down the government for two weeks.

Do we remember the Easter of 2019? We’re going to shut down the government for two weeks. Now, I believe that first administration, there were mistakes being made. I’m just pointing out these mistakes that were being made, shows you he’s not infallible, but it was a great administration.

24:47 Many small businesses like my own got rich under that first administration and we thought we were getting more of the same. We did not think we were going to be at war with our own government worse than we were with the Biden administration, where we don’t know what a price is going to be. I mentioned in a show earlier that the cost of some of the raw material that I need for my paint business is going to be three times higher than it is right now within two months, three times higher. That’s what trade wars do and that’s inflation. Everybody is saying, I don’t know if this is going to be inflationary or not. What kind of idiotic world did you grow up in if you don’t think that 145% tariff from what you need to buy is not going to be inflationary? How does a company pay 145% tariff on a product and absorb it when they make a five or six or seven percent net? No, you have to pay for it.

You’re paying to make America great again out of your pocket. 

China’s not going to pay for it. Mexico’s not going to pay for it. Canada’s not going to pay for it, except maybe in blood.

26:00 It’s time that the American public educates themselves. And unfortunately, I believe because of our terrible school systems and our terrible politicians, as well as our leaders in business world and else, the American public do not have the education that they need to make rational decisions and to vote for people to make rational decisions. This is how we got a Barack Obama. This is how we got a George W. Bush. This is how we got Joe Biden. This is how we get wrong leaders because we are not educated. We do not know our history. We don’t know the mistakes we are making when we make them. Business leaders know what they’re doing. You may not like them. You may realize they’re stealing from you, and they are. These companies are stealing from you, but at the same time, they have the brains to make sure, for the most part, everybody in America is still living a pretty good life. Matter of fact, if 38% of Americans aren’t working and they’re getting by pretty good because they don’t want to go to work, they’re not even on the unemployment rolls, that tells you that life in America is still pretty damn sound, and life in America is what people like it to be, and that is contrary to what you’re being told by the people who say that America is in the worst shape it’s ever been. Well, financially, America is in the worst shape it’s ever been. Can it get out of it? Yes. I will give you a plan in a few days of how to get out of it, but I’m telling you right now, it’s these policies that we are following that will bury America. Believe it or not, I thought it was going to be the Democrats to bury America, and it’s going to turn out to be the person I voted for, unless someone can get to him and send some reality to him.

27:32 Melania, where are you when we need you? You helped control this man four or five years ago. It’s about time we get you to get involved again because I know you’re smart enough, you’re worldly enough from where you came from to understand what it’s like to be in a global we are, if you like it or not, in a globalist world. The majority of the products you consume, you buy, and you use come from other countries, and they could never come from America even if you wanted it to.If you’re buying, for example, like I said earlier, coffee, tea, bananas, you’re not going to get it from America. If you want plums in the wintertime, in January, you’re not going to get plums in America. If you want all the produce that you’re expected to find in your grocery store in December, January, February, you’re not going to buy what you can buy today. It’s not available if you’ve got to depend only on America. This is the kind of stuff that nobody’s planning about. I grew up in the 1960s.

I grew up in the 1970s where when you went to the A&P grocery store in 1969, you did not find the produce in January like you can find today in any store because we didn’t have international trade. We didn’t have the Southern Hemisphere, which when it’s winter up north in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s summer, so you didn’t have the summer crops fresh to your grocery store within days of being picked in the 1960s and 70s like you do today. I don’t know if there are that many Americans who are going to want to go back to the 1960s or 70s when it comes to giving up their cell phone, when it comes to giving up their big screen TV, when it comes to giving up their car that thinks for you and drives for you because of all the microchips and computer chips in it from other countries, or for that matter, are going to want to give up the food they enjoy today. I don’t think it’s the case, and I think there’s a lot of mistakes being made and something needs to be done and needs to be done quick or we are in terrible trouble in the near future.

29:45 Well, that’s today’s show. I’m sorry I bombarded you with all these facts and things that I don’t think anybody out there is going to want to listen to. I’m sorry you don’t want to listen to it. I know the ancient Israelis didn’t want to listen to the prophet Isaiah or the prophet Jeremiah either. I’m not considered myself a prophet of God. I am a prophet of common sense. I can read the Bible and know what it predicts, and I can also read the newspapers and listen to a TV show filled with business leaders and know what they’re saying, and I can know what’s BS and I know what is the facts, and the facts are not what is on the side of this administration right now.

Maybe I chased a few of you a way, if so, it is to your loss, not mine.

This is Bob Barney for the Plain Truth Today…bye bye.