Iran War Update: Sneaking out oil and strikes resume | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpekclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, rite to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. Alrighty, so do you remember that day? I mean, I am old enough to remember it. I mean mainly because like I was saying these things, but there was this day in the past when I was talking about the Strait of horror moves and or hormas. That's how they pronounce it over there in that part of the world. By the way, did you know that that water is like ninety degrees the water in the Persian Gulf and the Strait, it's like ninety to ninety five degrees. Anyway, I don't know why I just thought of that. I thought, well, I saw the data point like two days ago, and it just stuck with me. It's like bathwater, you know, ugh, not refreshing at all. If you fall into that drink anyway. Do you remember the day when I was talking about how the Straight of Warmus was closed, and I was saying something along the lines of like, I don't really think that the strait could not be opened by the US military if we wanted to do so. You remember that. I mean, it was like way back, well. Yesterday actually, now, to be fair, I had been saying this for well ever since the Iranians said that they quote unquote closed it. It's not closed. It's under threat, right, like anybody that. It's not like they erected some sort of like water barrier or some wall across the thing. No, they just are threatening to shoot at anybody who transits through the Strait of Hormuz, right, And as long as the Iranians are doing that, then the insurance companies said, we're not going to give insurance to those vessels. And so what the commercial vessels then say is, well, if we don't have insurance to protect these multimillion dollar tanker ships and cargo vessels, then we're not going to sail, right because there's no insurance coverage. And then you may recall, because we covered it at the time, the administration came along and said we'll underwrite the insurance, but they left out one particular kind of policy coverage. They said, we're going to fund insurance if you need insurance, because all the insurance is run through the Maritime Commission or something like that in London. They control it all in London, and we were fine with that for a long time, but now now the you know, the Brits are a bit it's a brick, a bit dicey, you know that relationship and their ability to actually control uh maritime trade. So what then. You have the insurance provider saying no, you have the Americans saying we'll provide it, but we're not going to write all the types of coverage. One of the coverage types, if I recall correctly, it's been a couple of weeks, but if I recall correctly, is something like casualty for the sailors. So if anybody dies in one of these attacks and Hull, I think is what the other one was. So if you get the side of your ship hit, then they're not going to cover that. And people in the maritime industry looked at that and said, huh, that's weird. Why would you offer all of these other types of insurance lines, but not those. Right. So in other words, it's like the administration is saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do it. We'll do insurance, but not for. The stuff that's most likely to happen if you were to try to get through, right, And people are like, this proves they don't know what they're doing. But certain people on the inside of the industry were saying, this is an effort to squeeze the British control of maritime trade. Because the Brits I covered this at the time, they through their green energy policies, right, they were squeezing US maritime trade. They were making shipbuilding to expensive, basically outlawing all kinds of types. Of boats and such. And I said at the time when Iran started threatening the Straight and I said, I don't believe that if we wanted to open it, we could not reopen it. So then it becomes a question of why why would we not reopen it? Obviously there is some sort of a benefit. And then in fact the administration comes in and puts up its own blockade, and now the Iranians can't get their oil out, which means the Chinese can't get the oil right, They're actually now raiding and have been. They're raiding their oil reserves. They're depleting their reserve. They have filled their reserves with all of this sanctioned Iranian oil, you know, in contravention to the sanctions. So this is squeezing them as well. I went over a lot of this stuff months ago. Okay, And so you got these boats that are sitting in the Persian Gulf. They can't go through the Strait of Hormuz unless, yes, maybe I'm gonna spit ball a crazy idea here, Maybe we don't know everything that's going on. Maybe there was some other information that we were not privy to. Well, yes, that actually is the case. That was the case. Yesterday President Trump divulged for the first time that we actually have been moving boats through the Straight of horror moves, and we've been doing it for the last month. So while everybody has been complaining that the strait is closed, Deron's got the upper hand and all of this, it turns out we've actually moved somewhere in the neighborhood of about one hundred million barrels of oil. Through the strait. And this explains why that drone got shot off because the IRGC finally figured it out after like four weeks of us moving all these boats. And by the way, you know how we did it, we did it the same way the Iranians were doing it. They just turn off there I forget what it's called. It like the IAS system or something. It's basically like their geolocation, their transponders and stuff. They just shut them off and in the dark of night they sail along the other side of the strait, along the coast of Oman. They sail along there. They have in some cases they have US military troops on those boats. Then they either do a transfer of the oil to another tanker who proceeds on its way, or if it's like liquefied natural gas that kind of a thing, then they just go on their way. That's been occurring, but the IRGC, the Iranians finally figured it out, and that's why they've been throwing these missiles every now and again throughout the strait. That's so like when we get the information and we see, oh my gosh, what like why would they have shot this drone at our Apache helicopter? Right, we don't know why they would do it. And so there is this tendency among the media and Democrats, but I repeat myself, and a faction of the self proclaimed Maga right, who for some reason see this as a defeat, like, oh, well, this is Iran flexing its muscle. We should just get out and all of that, because you don't have all the information, you don't know what prompted it, and what prompted it was actually pretty freaking cool. The fact that we've been moving one hundred million barrels of oil out of the Persian gold for the last month, in the dead of night, right under their noses. That is a humiliation, they claimed. Remember they've been claiming the straits are closed, and Trump has been saying the strait is not closed. And everybody's like, what is Trump saying? He's stupid, He is lying, he doesn't know what he's talking about. And I always thought that's weird. He's the president. I would figure that, like his military people would be telling him what's going on, right, But he said yesterday, I haven't been able to I haven't been able to say any of this because the Iranians did not know. But now they know, and so now I can tell you that's what's actually been happening. And so now that basically it was Operation Freedom right whether they said we're going to start escorting the ships and then they had to shut it down, remember, and everybody was like, what a defeat for Trump, unless, of course you publicly shut it down, so the Iranians think that it's shut down, and in the meantime you actually keep doing it. Deception, folks, Sun sou art of war, very elemental stuff like warfare one oh one kind of thing, you know. But I know, come eighty eight, he doesn't know what he's doing. Nobody around him knows what they're doing either. So. Iran is stronger or something. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. 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They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot Com. Let me jump over to the phones now and chat with Travis. Hello, Travis, mister Pete. Two and fifty years at WBT. Is that carrier pigeon? No, No, it's it's two hundred and fifty years of America and fifty years of the WBT Sky Show. Well, so, looking at the issue with Hormuz right now, I can't go on a conservative news site without seeing an opped on. You know, we can't trust the Iranians. We're playing into their game. And I don't know what's going on inside foreign policy networks, but I feel like we have enough data points on the outside to get some inferences. The first data point is I feel like every time States tries to punish a country with sanctions, China gets a fire sale. Right, Venezuela, we sanctioned them. Now China's only the only place buying them, and they say, well, if we're your only market, then we should get a discount. So China buys something like eighty percent of the world sanctioned oil right now. Well, they're not getting the Venezuelan oil anymore. Well, I think that's part of it. So last year, you know Scott Bessen, The one thing we know about him is he made his money by having a creative view of global economics, right. And last year he negotiated some sort of a cash swap with Argentina that has too complex for me to understand, but basically it amounted to a loan. Right. And then Hormuz shuts down, and all of a sudden, these big companies are going to invest money into infrastructure that's going to alleviate the drama of having Hormus shut down. Oh and Argentina, well here and I would add to that about shutting down the drama. You now have projects underway going to come online in a year, maybe two of these of additional pipelines to bypass the straight of horror modes. Yeah, out of UAE and exaution. I saw one estimation that the whole timetable has been pushed forward by four years because all the red tape suddenly disappeared. Argentina's got this this new oil reserve, Vaca de Morte, supposed to have tons of oil in it, and now they're supposed to be done with a pipeline connecting that oil field with the ocean by the end of this year, where it wasn't supposed to be this year at all. So that's that's two pieces, right. So China is being deprived of the oil that they've been relying on, and alternative routes of oil that don't involve the Middle East are getting a cash infusion, while the Horn moves is closed. Right right, which, by the way, is one of the reasons why the price of oil has not gone above you know, one hundred and fifty dollars a barrel, as people were, you know, doom saying when all of this started. That's what people were saying, Brace for one hundred and fifty two hundred dollars barrel of oil. But those are futures markets and so looking at like what the infrastructure getting put into the ground so quickly. Now these market the traders are looking at and they're saying, Okay, well this is going to you know, solidify oil transport in a safer way and you don't have to pay the Iranian you know, basically the terrorist charge, which is like usually twenty to thirty dollars a bay. You got to factor that into the price of any oil that you're getting out of the Middle East. Well, I've seen some fluff pieces saying that we have China to thank for the fact that the prices haven't been as high as they could be. And what they mean by that is that China has elevated their effort to move to electronic electrical vehicles. So I think fifty five percent of new vehicle purchases in China have been easys. So China's trying to diminish their oil reliance. So what does that mean is when Iran comes back into the market, they're going to be competing with Argentina and Brazil at a new level. They're going to have a smaller market than China. So Iran's going to be diminished in the interim. China's being pressured, I really think, because remember Trump went to Beijing and then like a week later Putin went to Beijing. I really think part of this is putting pressure on China to put pressure on Russia. Because remember Trump spent the first year of this administration trying to resolve things in Ukraine, and I wonder if he's moving in to China to try to resolve that because it didn't work the other way around. And I feel like the longer the seas fire the ceasfire talks drag on, the better it is for Trump. And I don't know, but I feel like he doesn't mind the ceasefire talks drag it on. See this is this is a great point because I've said from the beginning of the ceasefire, when everybody was like, I don't understand, and this is that No, you know, Iran's got the uh this ace card that they have played. But that's the thing about your card is that once you play the card, as Iran did with the straight, the card is played, it's burned. You can't use it again. And now that it's played, the Iranian regime doesn't have any other card to play. And so if Trump is willing to and that's the thing it's going it's war is a test of your opponent's wills, right, and so if they're not, if they're going to k before you do, then you're perfectly fine to weight them out. And Iran is banking on Trump not wanting to wait them out because of mid term elections, because of you know, economic problems and all of that. So there, that's that's their game. It's delay. The problem is is if they've miscalculated that Trump is perfectly willing to sacrifice the midterm elections. He doesn't care about them, he said, he doesn't care about him. He said that. So if he's willing to ride it out to make the Iranian regime collapse and have another uprising in Iran from the people and meanwhile reorder the global map when it comes to oil production and shipping and maritime protection, maybe that's the Maybe that's the plague. I've never said for D chess, but this feels like for D chess and harmonies. Anyway, Yes, sir, No, Yeah, I appreciated Travis. I've said the same. I'm not one of these people who says Trump is always thinking eighteen moves ahead. He's playing seventy dimensional chess, Like I don't believe that. However, Like when you start to see these different pieces, and it's kind of hard for me not to recognize that there may actually be some larger strategy at play. Now that being said, it's war, and so you know, the whatever plans you have do not survive the first interaction with the enemy, right, Plans change in war. All the time I went over. I think yesterday I talked about how there was this initial plan The New York Times it reported that there was this plan they were going to install Akhmadenijad in Iran after the regime fell and all of this like that was and they were going to have the Kurds come in and it didn't happen. And maybe that's why the ceasefire was enacted, and maybe that's why the delay occurred. I don't know, but I just I hear these different theories and I toss them around, and you start thinking, well, like, if we can do this stuff, but then why haven't we Because we haven't wanted to. Then you have to ask why haven't we wanted to? Well, there must be some benefit for not wanting to whatever that benefit is. Maybe there are multiple benefits that there are also costs to be sure, but head over to the uh WBT text line driven by Liberty Buick gmc diane says, thank you for conveying that potus quote might just have a bit more information than the armchair warrior policy gurus online sun Su Warcraft. Indeed, I was screaming at my radio yesterday when Curtis Sliwa was subbing for Brett Winterble and emphatically called this war a complete sellout to the aspirations of Israel. Oh my god, as if he knows. Yeah, yeah, like it's so immature, And by that, I mean like undeveloped. Right, It's just it's it's it's a mind virus. It literally is. You cannot if you cannot see like Iran has been at war with America for fifty years. Okay, that's not me telling you that, that's Iran telling you that. That's a ron telling America for fifty years. Just because you don't want to acknowledge it doesn't mean that they don't believe it and that they are not engaging in that kind of behavior they have been. Now you can listen to what they say and then say they don't really mean it, which is a pretty big gamble. That's a pretty big gamble. Okay. This has been going on for a long time, and again this always comes down to the central question should Iron be able to get a nuke? And for some reason, all the people claiming that the one topic you can't talk about that they talk about all the time about Israel, you know, dragged us into this war, they never can answer this question. For some reason, should Iron get a nuke? Should they be allowed to get a nuke? Very simple question? Should they be able to do so? And if you say no, okay, then what do you do to prevent that? What does America do to prevent that? We shouldn't have to do anything. It should be up to somebody else to prevent that. Okay. So what you're saying then is that either the entire Middle East goes to war, right, because that's what will happen, I assume, or. They get the nuke. So when so back to the first question, then, should Iron be able to get a nuke? Your answer is probably yes, they should be able to get a nuke. They should be able to control the straight up formose they should be able to control twenty percent of the global oil supply and shut it down whenever they want to. Right, that's what you're saying without saying. R J says, Iranians want a Vietnam conflict to drain the US slowly over time. It's asymmetric warfare. That's exactly right. Our neo cons did not get this. So Trump is trying to get out from under their influence, hopefully. Allen says, tons of oil. Dude, we use standard buttload here, metric buttload for the Kamis. That's fair. That's fair. Looks like they kind of took our idea about shuffling the oil around the horn of Oman. We suggested a pipeline. But whatever gets it done, I guess. Also, I don't know if it's a horn or a jut or just a bump. I'm just kind of winging it here. I don't know what the geological term is for that either. Eighth three number, You and all the rest of the Iran war defenders are getting more and more delusional and engaging in ever more ridiculous mental gymnastics to try to justify this thing. I don't know. I feel like I've made a pretty solid case over the last four months. Eighth three number. You should call in and disabuse me of these ideas. You seem to have the inside skinny on what the real reasons are and how it's really going. So enlighten us, tell us how we're wrong. Get on the phone, same number. I know you know it. It's in your phone. You just texted it, So go ahead and give me a call. I'd love to hear the arguments about this, like what am I delusional about? What are the mental gymnastics? What's going on? Because if you follow as I do some of the people in the maritime industry, what they've been talking about in the Strait of Horror moves for the last three weeks has been this movement of ships and they have not been able to figure out what exactly was going on. And then Trump comes out yesterday and says we've actually been moving one hundred million barrels through this that's right right under the nose of the IRGC nine eight zero number says, if Trump got that oil, where did it go? And why is our gas still so high? So the price of a gallon of gas in South Carolina is average about three dollars and seventy three cents. I know you guys got to update your talking points because you keep saying it's over four dollars a gallon. It's not North Carolina, it's three seventy eight. Okay. That oil was also already purchased. So you're buying, you're buying the next round. It's like a gas station. They're not selling. They're not selling the oil or the gas that's in their tanks. They're selling the next supply. And so if the next supply that they get is going to be more expensive, they have to jack the price on the gas that's in the tanks right now in order to afford the next resupply. Like look, I'm not an oil industry expert by any stretch, nor do I claim to be. But if you are genuinely interested in why the price of oil, which right now I think is trading it somewhere around ninety to ninety five dollars depending on the type of oil, it's like ninety to ninety five dollars like Brent and West Texas whatever. Remember what the prediction was initially was that when we bombed a run and then they closed the straight up ramouse, they said that oil was going to be over one hundred and fifty dollars a barrel, and why has it not been? Why is it still somewhere around ninety to ninety five. The other thing is I recognize that Americans are impatient and a not small portion of America is pretty spoiled. I'm sorry, but that's true. Okay. Like I just saw a quote from Alexandria Cazu Cortez and she said something along the lines of, how you know America is you know, this new generation of Americans have no idea what prosperity looks like. Yeah, it just take a look around. This is what prosperity looks like. Poverty is the natural state of man. Okay. So a lot of Americans have a warped idea of comfort and the amount of time it takes to do stuff right. And that's what Trump is up against on this. Got an email here from Denny. Denny says, Pete, let's not forget the ever eloquent Mike Tyson who said everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the mouth. Right, Yeah, plans change people. Let me go over and get Ralph on the program. Hello, Ralph, how. Are you I'm going wealthy and from a perspective of a senior citizen and everything. You know, I've worked hard all my life and been in business twenty six years. The question that I got for all these people and everything, once, and I don't care if it's in India, Pakistan or Iran or anywhere, once a nuclear bomb goes off. And this is just my opinion. You know, I think stock markets will crash. I think there'll be. You know, a downturn, and you know that possibly a lot of people getting laid off in America and everything due to something like that. And I just don't think a lot of people look down the road far enough to see what the consequences you know, could be. And I hope not, you know, I pray to God not. You know, I got three granddaughters. Yeah, I mean, this is always part of that calculation. If you want countries, you know, more countries to have nuclear weapons because you think somehow or another that's going to create stability. It might until it doesn't. You know. It's like you get a bunch of countries that have nukes and like, okay, well I want to attack you, you want to attack me, until you find one country that actually will use the nukes right, and a. Ran, you know, I mean they've been threatened enough and chanting death to America. I mean under Carter's watch, you know, the down down helicopters and box rescue attempt and everything. I mean, this is nothing new those people and the reason why they're still fighting they're nuts. They're nuts, man. They don't have any reasoning. And their theology, on the theology that they're living under and everything is to me, it just seemed like goom and death if you don't obey them. It is I think the word is molocawa or something. It's like essentially, you know, it's this ideology that you have to keep sacrificing your own people in order to achieve God's plan. And that's what they are engaged in. And look, I mean the Iyatola was in France before he you know, went back during in nineteen seventy nine, and what he was doing was developing his sort of fusionist idea, which is Marxism wedded to jihadism, and that is a revolutionary ideology. And revolutions must be exported because they're parasitic, right, so they need to and that's why they've got the fronts in Lebanon, you know, in you know, with Hamas Hesba Lah Palston in Jihad, the whuties. That's why, that's why they export all of this is because that's what a revolutionary ideology has to do. And it is wedded to Marxism as well. So for people who don't want to accept this reality, I don't know what to say except you're not dealing in reality and they cannot be trusted. And then they you know, usually hear well, North Korea has got a nuke. Yeah, and look what they do with it, right, They threaten everybody around them until the world caves and gives them, you know, rice and food basically because they they're also communists and so they are starving all of their people. It's basically one big prison country there. And nobody can do anything to help any of the North Koreans because and you can't apply pressure to them because they have the nuke, and so they get to just you know, do whatever they want. Thank goodness. Their ideology is not sort of. An exporting kind of ideology, although they do make some efforts into South Korea every now and again. They do espionage and that sort of stuff. But they're you know, they're more content to just be sort of this hermit nation, and that works for them. If they were to get aggressive, options are very, very limited because they have the nuke, and that to me is not that's not a reason to let ira On have a nuke. It's actually a reason to not let them have one. It's it's to block that. So, Ralph, I appreciate the calls, so good to hear from you. Okay, I've got a bunch of bunch of texts here two five two number. There's no excuse for the current price of crude oil, as there is no crude oil shortage. The American people are getting screwed simply due to the stock exchange futures market speculator manipulation whose only interest is keeping their filthy rich crude oil investors richer. Crude oil should be nationalized to eliminate the uncontrolled greed of the stock exchange betting casino. Okay, I reject communism. I'm anti communists. Addressing the use by the way, that also ignores the entire global marketplace. Right three to one three number says addressing the use of a nuclear weapon, the more they are used the easy they are to use. Yeah, and that's the thing. Like one nation sets off a nuke, you have no idea what other nations are going to do in response, and you end up in World War three. For all the people that are so worried about world this being world War three with Iran, you know, world War three with the I mean, you could argue the Cold War was world War three and this would be World War four. But whatever. Like the idea though, that we have to just let Iran run wild in the Middle East as if it's going to be contained there in order to prevent world War three. Yeah, letting Iran one run wild and letting them get a nuclear warhead increases the likelihood of nuclear armour get in. That's my view. You're free to disagree, but that's that's my view on it. Seven O four Numbers says, with all this horror mooz stuff going right under our noses, we must need a e n t Obama and Biden were able to move billions of US money right under the noses of US citizens. No one sounded a peep in alert or protest. If I recall correctly, the Democrats all swore that it was not true. Yeah, yeah, they did claim that that wasn't the case. Kevin says, I kind of wish the straight of Hormu State closed a bit longer and the oil prices stayed elevated four or five four of the five. Last time's energy prices spiked and stayed high for several months. It pushed the markets into a pullback. I've put half my portfolio in short term treasuries and the other half in blue chips. The t bills are the dry powder to bring to bear bear market in the market when that pullback does happen. All right, that's way above my pager. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone. M