![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/OilExports-B.jpg\")
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I mean, these are the people that claim to have all the compassion, they have all the understanding, they have all of the feelings for people, they\u2019re running around: “Could be an opening for the Democrats.” What does it mean to say that the coronavirus, it could be an opening for the Democrats? It means the suffering of people could be an opening for Democrats. And they\u2019re all excited about it. And they\u2019re unable to let go of it.<\/p>\n
Now, before we get to the coronavirus, in particular the American political situation in specific, let me explain to you what\u2019s going on with the stock market and the oil markets. There is in Saudi Arabia — to me this is fascinating. There\u2019s a 31 — he may be 33 years old now — a 33-year-old kid. He is one of the many sons of the current king of Saudi Arabia. Now, the king of Saudi Arabia is one of the many brothers of the founder of Saudi Arabia who goes way, way — Saudi Arabia is not that old.<\/p>\n
As a piece of real estate, it\u2019s as old as biblical times, but as it\u2019s currently structured, Saudi Arabia, it was founded by a guy whose last name is al-Saud. And he had countless sons. He had some brothers out there, too, but he\u2019s had countless sons. He had enough sons that for the last 50 years one of them has been king. Now, prior to the current king, the old king was King Abdullah, and King Abdullah did not have any sons. Well, he had sons, but he did not have any that attempted to make end runs around the royal family structure.<\/p>\n
So when King Abdullah died, the next son of the founder was King Salman. King Salman himself is 80-some-odd years of age. Don\u2019t know how intact he is \u2019cause we don\u2019t know about the inner workings of the Saudi royal family. They\u2019re more mysterious than Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. And they\u2019ve got much more oil than Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have. But, you see, oil is no longer the exclusive province of Saudi Arabia, and therein begins the beginning of the problem faced by the kingdom.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t that long ago the world depended on them. They could set the price for oil. They ran OPEC. They literally could determine world economies. And everybody was dependent on them, and everybody kissed their rear ends, and everybody did everything they could to be friends. And these guys endowed presidential libraries. I mean, you\u2019d have to go wide and far to find a presidential library in this country not primarily or significantly underwritten by a Saudi king. King Abdullah was a particularly good friend of the Bushes, for example. This is not a criticism. I\u2019m just giving you some background here.<\/p>\n
There was a member of the Saudi royal family who was an ambassador to the United States. And his name was Prince Bandar. He lived in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and he became as Americanized as the royal family will allow any of its members to become Americanized. And Prince Bandar bin Sultan used the diplomatic pouch of Saudi Arabia for all sorts of things.<\/p>\n
Like did you ever wonder how it was — I maybe shouldn\u2019t divulge — I\u2019ll go ahead and tell you. Do you ever wonder how it is so many Washington power brokers ended up with Cuban cigars? They\u2019re in the Saudi diplomatic porch. You can\u2019t question what comes in the diplomatic pouch. I mean, folks, these people had it wired. They had it wired. And when oil was the exclusive province of Saudi Arabia, there\u2019s always been oil producing countries, but you remember the old saw. All those years, all those presidential campaigns, all these candidates promising to end dependence on Saudi oil, and nobody ever did.<\/p>\n
We have had the means to do so for a long time, but we never did it because it would be expensive. To cut to the chase, fracking has done as much to destroy the Saudi exclusivity over oil in the world as anything, and fracking is a distinct American procedure, and it\u2019s a way of getting oil out of the ground that heretofore was way too expensive to do. It was not productive. It was not profitable. You could get it, but it would cost you more than you could ever sell refined products for. You couldn\u2019t sell gasoline or kerosene, jet fuel for anywhere enough of a profit to make fracking worthwhile.<\/p>\n
But as American technology improved and as more and more people got involved — and, you know, the Dakotas have been revived by shale oil production. A number of states in this country have. It is the fact that we can now get oil from shale rock that has done one of the greatest bits of damage to Saudi Arabia. Now, we\u2019re allies with them, so we\u2019ve not held it over their heads nearly as much as we could have. But we are now a net exporter of fossil fuel energy, a net exporter of natural gas and oil brought about by fracking.<\/p>\n
Whenever you have had natural gas, you find oil. Wherever you find oil, you\u2019ll find natural gas. Natural gas is a clean fossil fuel. It\u2019s not a pollutant. It doesn\u2019t create so-called greenhouse gases. It\u2019s clean as it can be — and we own it. We own it! But we\u2019ve always had an allied relationship with Saudi Arabia. But the Russians have not, and what\u2019s happening today with oil is that the new crown prince, this 33-year-old kid who has…<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/APP-030920-Crown-Prince-Mohammed-bin-Salman-PUTIN.jpg\")
He put his own mother under house arrest! I want you to figure this. Now, follow me on this. Mohammed bin Salman, 31 years old, decides that he\u2019s going to become the next king. There are many of his brothers older than he is, further in line, closer in line to the crown than he is. But somehow, Mohammed bin Salman has launched himself above every other rival, including his own brothers. He\u2019s now the crown prince, which means he\u2019s de facto ruler of the country.<\/p>\n
His father, King Salman, still is the figurehead, but has allowed all of this to happen. In fact, in order for Mohammed bin Salman to secure this position he had to put his mother and two of her sisters in house arrest for like three to four months, just sequester them away in one of the palaces (she was essentially in prison) so that she could not run opposition to him in favor of some of her other sons. Stop and think.<\/p>\n
Her husband is Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s father. Where was he when the kid put the mother under house arrest? He didn\u2019t care! This should tell you about women and Saudi Arabian forms of Islam. The mother can be sacked away. Now, granted, it\u2019s gonna be a palatial house in which she\u2019s in house arrest, but she\u2019s under house arrest. She can\u2019t leave. She can\u2019t interact with the family. She\u2019s essentially in prison.<\/p>\n
Her son puts her there with two or three of her sisters, and her husband (his dad) either doesn\u2019t know or is perfectly fine with it. You and I cannot relate to this. Snerdley, can be could you imagine putting your mom in jail and your dad not caring that you did it? And then can you imagine all of that happening so that you can take from your dad whatever he has and run the show? Well, this is what\u2019s happening. But the kid\u2019s 31, 33 years old. It\u2019s an amazing story.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a book coming out (I think being released tomorrow) about all of this. I haven\u2019t read it. But all of this fascinates me on a number of levels. Now, Mohammed bin Salman… I\u2019ll tell you something else that happened, folks, before I get to what\u2019s roiling the markets here. I want you to have as much background as you can. It was either last summer or two summers ago, and I forget which because time flies. One of the ritziest luxury hotels in Saudi Arabia is the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh.<\/p>\n
Mohammed bin Salman took it over and used it as a jail! He put his nephews, he put his brothers, he put his uncles in this prison and charged them with corruption. One of them, one of the guys that he put in jail, was… If you remember, after 9\/11 there was a Saudi prince — yeah, Saudi, Abu Dhabi, maybe — Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin or some such thing. This guy offered $10 million or $15 million or billion to help we build the World Trade Center if we would do something with the Jews — and, of course, we told the guy to pound sand.<\/p>\n
But he\u2019s a heavy investor in a lot of American businesses and products. He was a heavy investor in Apple for a time. Mohammed bin Salman put this guy in jail in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and said, “You have gotten what you have by virtue of corruption. You need to give back to the government of Saudi Arabia X number of billions of dollars.” The guy was in jail for months before the guy finally said, “Okay, I\u2019ll give the money back.” A 31-, 33-year-old kid was doing all the this.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/APP-041118-Complex-Understandable-ADJUSTED.jpg\")
When I say “kid,” everybody he\u2019s doing this to is 20 years older than he is and has been around a lot of longer and supposedly would have roots of power that are much deeper than his. But he\u2019s doing all of this with the permission of his father, the king. Well, Mohammed bin Salman decided about three to four years ago that Saudi Arabia was too vulnerable as an oil-only nation. “If the only export and product we had for people to invest in was oil,” he said, and he was right about this, “we\u2019re too vulnerable.<\/p>\n
“Because what happens with the supply when and if that day comes?” And it\u2019s hundreds of years from now, by the way. Don\u2019t believe anybody who says we\u2019re gonna run out of oil next year, next month. We\u2019ve got so many hundreds of years of oil, \u2019cause oil continues to be made. A lot of people when they hear “fossil fuels,” they think oil is the result of dinosaurs that died years ago and pretty soon we\u2019re gonna run out of all those fossils. That\u2019s not what fossil fuels are.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a big misnomer and something improperly named. Fossil fuels are still being made, and they\u2019re made in particular places in the world. Saudi Arabia happens to be where there are most deposits. But so is the United States. Now, Mohammed bin Salman was correct about something. He was correct that the Saudi royal family and Saudi Arabia needed to diversify. So you might remember he went on a world tour shortly after Trump was elected.<\/p>\n
Mohammed bin Salman comes to the United States, has massive meetings with Ivanka and Jared Kushner. He had massive meetings with tech valley people, Silicon Valley people. He had massive meetings with Hollywood people. He was pitching Saudi Arabia as an investment site for all kinds of things besides oil. He wanted movie studios to be built there. He wanted Silicon Valley to invest in structures, factories, think tanks, you name it, in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n
This roiled Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia had never westernized like this. They did not believe in westernizing like this, and when Mohammed bin Salman went to meet these guys, he dressed in a pair of jeans and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt. He\u2019d maybe wear the headdress, but that was it. He\u2019s kind of a short little, chunky guy when you take the robes off of him. But that doesn\u2019t matter. He\u2019s got whatever hundreds of gazillions of dollars he\u2019s got, which speaks.<\/p>\n
Well, while it was well thought out, this plan to diversify Saudi Arabia has not materialized. In other words, Hollywood has not built a bunch of studios there yet. Silicon Valley has not built a bunch of factories, think tanks, or — shall we say — intellectual education centers there. They may, but they haven\u2019t yet. At the same time that Mohammed bin Salman was doing this, he was also authoring regulations that would allow women to drive for the first time in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n
Remember that? He was allowing women to meet in public without permission of their husbands. He was allowing them to go to lunch together without their husbands or security watchdogs being around. This was all designed specifically to make the Western world think that Saudi Arabia was modernizing, westernizing so as to be more easily seen as a place to invest money. Well, the plans were visionary, and they were wise.<\/p>\n
I mean, Saudi Arabia… Everybody needs to diversify. You never want to have all your eggs in one basket, even if it is Saudi Arabia and oil. Because especially with the rise of the United States and fracking, they are not any longer the go-to place in the world if you want oil or to even set the price or the supply. Saudi Arabia used to be able to set the supply, thus demand, and determine the price for oil around the world. They were OPEC.<\/p>\n
Well, look, this is the CliffsNotes version of what\u2019s happened. Over the weekend and toward the end of late last week, Mohammed bin Salman was triggered. Something set the guy off, and he decided… There was an effort to destroy OPEC a year or so ago that bombed miserably, and it involved… If you remember, the oil market was flooded with supply, and the price of crude came way down. The price of gasoline came way down. You might remember, people were very worried about how the producers were gonna stay in business.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/APP-091619-Rush-Saudi-Oil.jpg\")
It was thought that this was an attack on fracking, which it was. Fracking still costs more to get oil out of the ground than traditional drilling of wells. Well, now we throw into the picture Russia. Mohammed bin Salman has made the decision — or the strategic realization has occurred to him — that if he\u2019s really gonna corner the oil market, if he\u2019s gonna really do damage, he\u2019s got to do damage to Russia. Russia is a massive producer of oil. But Russia\u2019s oil infrastructure is old and outdated, and what really is happening here — the reason why the market\u2019s down 1,300 points today — is oil.<\/p>\n
Mohammed bin Salman is flooding the world oil markets with cheap Saudi crude, and his number one target is Russia, and shale oil — which, to an extent, is the United States. I\u2019m sure that his effort here is not intended to do great damage to us, and I\u2019m sure he\u2019s been telling everybody in Washington, “Stick with me on this. Our common enemy is Russia,” because Russia in the Middle East is Syria, and Saudi Arabia… Look, it\u2019s Mohammed bin Salman that started the war in Yemen, which ended up getting one of their oil depots blown up a few months ago.<\/p>\n
Anyway, this is very, very complicated global geopolitics.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: Now, this drop in the oil price is gonna be good for the consumer, folks. This is good news for everybody except for producers. This always happens every time the production price of oil drops. The crude price, the barrel price, everybody panics; the stock market drops. But you watch what happens to your gasoline price coming up this summer going into the election. One more thing about Mohammed bin Salman. This past weekend he actually placed under house arrest one of his father\u2019s brothers (who was in line for succession to the crown) and one of his, I think, cousins for plotting a coup against him! They\u2019re in jail, and they rank higher…<\/p>\n
Well, nobody does since he\u2019s crown prince.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/TrumpSaudis.jpg\")
He is acting already as though he is with his father\u2019s full-fledged permission, including putting his own mother under house arrest to make sure she could not run interference against him with her other sons. And his father (doing impression), “Oh, you put mom in jail for — fine. Way to go, son. I wish I\u2019d thought of that.” I don\u2019t know how it works, folks. I don\u2019t know how this stuff works. We can\u2019t relate to it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/APP-072219-Iran-UK-Oil-002.jpg\")
OPEC is nations like Venezuela. OPEC, the oil producing and exporting countries, that\u2019s what OPEC stands for. And there\u2019s a whole bunch of them besides Saudi Arabia, and they\u2019re sick and tired of having to defer to them. So it\u2019s an effort by the crown prince to essentially reestablish Saudi Arabia as the dominant force in the Middle East where oil is concerned because his efforts to diversify have so far not come to fruition.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/APP-032018-Trump-Saudi-Prince.jpg\")
I mean, look. For all of the environmentalist wackos, this is a world which is governed by and runs on the free flow of oil at market prices. And you\u2019re seeing what happens when somebody tries to interrupt the free flow at market prices. Saudi Arabia today is trying to artificially — well, not artificially, they\u2019re doing it. But it\u2019s not market forces. They\u2019re unilaterally making decisions which are lowering the price and thus disrupting the flow. And this is what happens.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/APP-012720-Coronavirus.jpg\")
People understand what happens when artificial prices are introduced into a market when you try to undersell something. You flood the market with cheap products designed to punish other people in that business. People understand that. But I want to extrapolate from this to the coronavirus. I don\u2019t have time to do it now. We\u2019ll do it in the next hour. Let me get started on the phones. This is Gil in Philadelphia. You\u2019re up first today, Gil. Great to have you with us, sir. Hi.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/RushTaxes-Rush.jpg\")
That\u2019s not why they\u2019re doing this! They\u2019re doing this because they\u2019re irresponsibly spending money and they\u2019re just going to keep taking it from you no matter how much or how little you have left, because they can — and they\u2019re gonna dress it up. Their greed… This is Democrat lawmaker greed, and they\u2019re gonna say (sniveling), “Well, you\u2019re not spending enough time with your family anyway. So we\u2019re gonna make sure that you can\u2019t easy abandon Nanaw and Papaw.<\/p>\n