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July 27, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:24
July 27, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thank you very much for listening today.
I'm Roger Hedgecock from COGO Radio, KOGO Radio in San Diego.
We uh will be here today and tomorrow together.
And I'm looking forward to it.
I got so much to do here.
I'm gonna have to you're gonna have to listen a little faster this hour because a lot of a lot to cover.
Here's uh the CAFTA situation, the Central America Free Trade Agreement.
CAFTA would in effect end tariffs on about $33 billion in goods traded between the U.S. and Central American countries like uh Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua.
Uh it is an extension of the uh Caribbean Basin initiative initiated by the great Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, which was a reaction to communist inroads in the smaller island nation states of the Caribbean to allow those economies to have access to the American economy and to growth and trade with us.
This is an extension of that and sorely needed for the political reason, well, the economic reason in a moment, the political reason first, that Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, and uh Fidel Castro are new allies in these the uh Caribbean area,
the Central American area, and uh fueled and encouraged by China, they are making inroads into these Central American countries to foment communist-style revolutions again.
They haven't given up at all.
And Nicaragua and others are places where obviously there is significant remaining support for communist regimes.
That's the political.
Here's the uh economic.
Sugar is going to be a lot cheaper, so the stuff you love, chocolate, et cetera, gets cheaper.
Now, in some places where sugar beet growers have a stranglehold on local politicians, this is not seen as a good thing.
The uh couple of hundred uh families and corporations and farmers that that make an enormous amount of money in subsidies to to big sugar here in the United States, have been hanging on to this uh this tariff situation, this subsidy situation for years.
And it's about time it simply be uh relegated uh to the ash bin here.
Although there are Republicans in Florida, there are uh Democrats uh all over who are on the fence on this.
Now, union, the unions, what's left of the or what is uh currently in the AF of L CIO is uh dead set against CAFTA.
In fact, they have uh uh bluntly told every Democrat in the House, and the vote will probably be tonight.
They have bluntly told labor has bluntly told every Democrat, don't count on a penny from us.
There will be no waiver, no pass, nobody gets to vote yes on CAFTA.
You must, this is a deal breaker, this is a killer, you must vote no.
Courageously, there are a couple of dozen Democrats who are going to vote yes.
Others are being whipped into line by these labor threats.
None of that, I I dare say none of that labor threat stuff will ever make again the mainstream press, but you heard it here.
Uh the uh Republicans who are wavering are just as bad, wavering for the short-term reason that wait, wait a minute, big sugar, they put a lot of money in my campaign.
What am I gonna do?
Uh George Bush went down to the House of Representatives today, met with Republicans only, and uh basically uh laid the same kind of wood on them.
This is a make or break deal.
Uh if you're uh a friend of mine, you're a friend of this bill, et cetera.
So we'll see what happens uh today on this, but it is a huge decision by the United States government to blunt Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and their latest Central American meddling with economic progress, a better times, and more trade.
It will cost us some uh four billion plus over ten years in tariff revenue to the federal government, a real drop in the bucket, a mist in the bucket.
But it will give us uh two or three or four times that in reduced cost for sugar and other items that will come in cheaper to the United States.
So an issue that uh that you need to know about today in the House of Representatives.
Now back to the uh war on terror and the polling data I promised.
Here is um let's a um Pew Global uh Attitudes project uh dated July of this year.
And it is a remarkable in its uh, first of all, in what they tried to do and then what the result was.
Uh The news, of course, is a backdrop here from Iraq, the news from Iraq and the rest of the Middle East is almost uniformly bad.
You hear in the news only about the bombings and the deaths and etc.
The reality is, this is in Investors Business Daily today.
The reality is that we are winning, not just in Iraq, but around the world with Muslims, the majority of Muslims.
Now, acts of terror dominate the front page, the TV screen.
Oh, I know all of that.
But will it all just go away if we stop fighting and go home?
No.
The fanatics will continue to do what they did before we were fighting them.
When we were just turning the other cheek under the Clinton administration, they were still fighting.
When we were saving Muslims from being in this war with the Serbs and Kosovar, and Clinton intervened to the reward we got is they bombed the USS coal.
So whether we fight or not fight, we still get from the fanatics the war.
But the progress of democracy in the Muslim world is worth mentioning.
Not only in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But if you look at all the other countries and ask the question, as the Pew research folks did, and they're no friends of the United States, you know what some of the other polls have said.
They asked the question, can democracy work in your country?
In Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, and Indonesia.
Indonesia, 77%, yes.
They just elected in their first free and fair election a president in a Muslim country.
Democracy and Islam do go together in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world.
In Morocco, 83%, yes.
In Lebanon, 83%, yes.
Just getting rid of the uh the Syrians, just getting rid of the Syrians.
And they just had an election.
And they the Syrians are assassinating everybody that stands up, and the others stand up in their place.
Even while we can't get people to get out and vote in the United States.
People are getting assassinated because they want democracy and free elections, and others are standing in their place.
In Jordan, it's 80 percent.
In Morocco, it's 83%, I think I said that.
And now in Pakistan, it's more difficult, 43 percent.
Turkey, where they have an elected government, it's only 48 percent.
But those are huge numbers of people in very important questions committed to democracy.
Not all Muslims are the same.
The fanatics get the headlines.
But not all Muslims are the same.
Here's some more, I want to flesh this out a little bit more with another poll.
This is a Guardian ICM poll of more than a thousand British Muslims uh printed in uh the uh Guardian and reprinted in Newsmax.
This and the headline uh is two-thirds of Muslims uh thought of leaving Britain.
Two-thirds of British Muslims, and there are, let's see, how many 1.6 million Muslims in Britain.
Two-thirds of them are thinking of leaving Britain after the bombings because they fear an anti-Muslim backlash.
20% say that they have already faced abuse or hostility from non-Muslim Britons since the bombings.
80% of Muslims in this poll believe that Britain's involvement in Iraq was a factor leading to the bombings.
To the bombings.
So that's all you know predictable and I think propaganda.
What's more interesting is they went on to ask more questions.
Were the attacks justified?
See, now you get down into the poll, you get past the headlines, you get on page three of the poll.
Were the attacks justified?
Five percent said yes.
Now match that, because 90 percent believe violence has no place in a political struggle.
That was the preceding question.
Ninety percent.
Violence is not acceptable to Islam.
Five percent, more attacks would be justified, it's great.
It's what we ought to do.
London Daily Telegraph did a poll.
10% of Muslims in England feel, quote, not at all loyal, unquote, to Britain.
Not at all loyal.
One percent feel that Western society is decadent and Muslims should seek to bring an end to it, quote, if necessary by violence, unquote.
One percent.
Now one percent is sixteen thousand people.
There are sixteen thousand Muslims in the UK, according to this poll, who believe that Western society's decadent ought to be brought down by violence if necessary.
Now you wonder why they only got two teams of four out of sixteen thousand.
So that's what Britain faces, is not all of its Muslims being a problem, but certainly too many of them.
Too many of them are a problem.
And then when the government gets serious about taking the troublemakers and getting them out of the country, here's the decadence that they find.
Let me take the case of Mohammed al-Masari.
I think I have time to do this.
An exile from Saudi Arabia.
He runs a website that shows videos of suicide bomb attacks in Iraq, including one in which three British soldiers are killed.
He supports the bombers.
He is one of these people in the 1%.
In the 1990s, he ran a group in London called the Committee for the Defense of Legal Rights.
What he was trying to do was to research all of the British laws that would protect people like him, advocating violence, from being deported.
He certainly didn't want to go back to Saudi Arabia because he had opposed the Saudi royal family, and from an Islamist point of view, by the way.
And the royal family was not amused.
They wanted him back.
He claimed refugee status, asylum status.
The British government back then in the 1990s would not give him back.
Even when the Saudis said, okay, we won't torture him, we'll give you assurances.
We want this guy back to try for trial.
The Brits would not send him back because of the 1951 UN convention on refugees, because of their asylum laws, because of their, you know, human rights.
Now they got this guy in their country, preaching violence, applauding the bombings, applauding the killing of Britons, the guy they gave refuge to, the guy they saved from being tortured by the Saudis, the guy they took in, turns around, uh, not only bites the hand that feeds him, uh, but tortures it before he bites it.
This is the problem that we're having there and here.
You want one more?
One more before the break.
Then I want you to run for the pink liquid.
The would-be one of the would-be suicide bombers in the second four, Yasin Hassan Omar, was not only in Britain, not only educated in Britain at taxpayers' expense, not only born in Britain, he was on welfare, got 75 pounds a week in housing benefit to pay for the one-bedroom flat where he was making the bombs.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, in for Rush, back after this.
Back on the Rush Limbaugh program, Roger Hedgecock filling in for rush today and tomorrow here at the EIB network at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, where the truth for the relentless pursuit of truth continues.
The relentless pursuit of truth, and here is the truth.
The Brits are finding out about these uh London uh bomb suspects.
Here's one, uh Mukhtar Saeed Ibrahim, 27 years old, planted a bomb on a bus in last week's attempted attack didn't work.
Turns out he was jailed in 1996 for five years for being part of a teenage gang and mugging people at knife point.
And the son, tabloid, said that Ibrahim had been from Eritrea, East African country uh and um next to Ethiopia, and uh that uh he was bitter about his five years in jail and was never the same person after that.
So let's see.
Got out in 2001, if he served five years from 1996.
This is 2005.
He waited till now to do these bombs.
Anyway, uh obviously the Brits are now saying, you know what, we better take another look at these folks we've let willy-nilly into our country.
Whereas most of them just want to be Brits and get good jobs and uh have a good life.
Obviously, some of them don't.
Now, according to the Washington Times, authorities in Britain are combing through the records of thousands of asylum seekers and refugees within the Somali, Kenyan, Eritrean, and Ethiopian communities in London.
Since uh these first-time Islamic militants from East Africa have played such a conspicuous role in terror cells there.
So what does it mean for our country?
Well, according to John Brennan, outgoing interim chief of the National Counter-Terror Center at an uh New York police department sponsored corporate security conference, he says, you know, we gotta be concerned about the people already in our midst, as opposed to someone who's being deployed from abroad.
Duh.
John, with a firm grasp of the obvious.
After years, after decades of open borders with Canada and Mexico, after recent events in which blatant terrorist cells in Low Dai and place in upstate New York and all kinds of other places, have now been busted for overt activities, terrorist activities, for going back and forth to terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, etc.
etc.
We're now coming to the conclusion, you know what?
We've got a lot of homegrown terrorists here.
We've got some people that maybe we shouldn't have let in.
Duh.
Here's Jason on a cell phone in Buffalo, New York.
Jason, welcome to the Rush Show.
Hey, Roger, how are you, sir?
Hi, good.
Uh I have an interesting point.
I wouldn't really label myself with anything left, right, center, or whatever.
Think just an average American owner business.
Um I think we should go back to a day of isolationism.
I really do.
In what way?
Uh in many ways.
Uh in business, for one, uh, we can pretty much stay the buying system no longer find all of our jobs.
Um we put high tariffs and everything.
Local companies and smaller businesses begin to grow and put pride back in their work instead of Austin.
I'm kind of losing you, Jason.
We're gonna put you on hold here just to see if we can uh get improve that signal because you're making an important point.
And let me just say to the rest of the audience that I think this is a growing thought in the United States.
You know, in the old days, we didn't have to worry about what happened overseas because we grew our own, we made our own, uh, we traded with each other.
We had a free trade uh agreement between the fifty states, and uh therefore, what do we need all this other stuff for?
Jason, I'm restating your position.
I'm saying that I think uh more and more people are thinking this way.
But let me just tell you what Are you there, Jason?
I'm here, sir.
Yeah.
Let me just tell you what I think it means.
Since we don't have enough oil to power our industrial uh economy, and we don't have a lot of other things that we can easily get in world trade, kind of tough to go back to the totally self-sufficient America of uh, you know, before the Civil War, say.
Kind of hard to go back to, and even then we imported rum from the Caribbean.
I mean, you could go through all that.
But the but the point is that it's very, very tough to uh imagine the United States economy as prosperous as it is now without international trade.
It probably means an economists can call and dispute the numbers, but it probably means an economy uh one half one-third to one half less prosperous than the one we have today.
So that would be the price.
That only prospers the big business owners.
The only one who really improves and excels in a global economy are the large uh business owners, which is less than one percent of the population.
And it's a very good thing.
So Jason, that's just that's just flat wrong, because I'll tell you why.
It used to be right, but it's wrong in the era of the Internet.
I know personally, dozens of small business people who've put their product up on the internet and sell it in international commerce.
Let me give you an example.
Friend of mine builds uh spas, you know, hot tubs, uh jacuzzies, if you will.
Uh he sells them in international commerce.
He now sells more in Europe because of the internet and his uh following network of of uh uh places he can sell it, that he got through the new way of of making the world your market instead of just your backyard.
So, Jason, if you're not in the international market selling your product, maybe you ought to think about doing it.
Well, no, beyond that, I I would I could possibly think of that.
But I I'm also talking beyond just economics.
I mean, if we went back to the isolationist and no longer foreign aid, all these countries that don't like us, no longer push our views on really anyone else and just focus on home.
One, we're not a terrorist uh target anymore.
And really, for for two, it it necessarily helps America out so much because we've been operating out of bankruptcy since 1933, and that's a fact.
And I can say, Jason, just to uh address one of your points.
Back when we were self-sufficient and we were isolationist in the Jefferson administration, Jefferson had to send warships over because the Muslim ruler of Tunis was attacking and uh holding hostage members of our uh merchant marine merchant fleet and uh asking for ransom from them.
We had we had terrorist Muslims when we were isolationists.
I don't think we're ever going to get away from that.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for rush today and tomorrow and taking your calls at 1 800 282 2882, hoping that you will uh take a look at Rush Limbaugh.com.
Check out that uh Club Gitmo gear.
That's about the funniest thing that I've uh heard in a long time.
And pictures pouring in to the website.
People in uh various poses and various places with their club Gitmo gear.
Worth a sh definitely worth a look.
All right, here's Tom in Rapid City, uh South Dakota.
Hi, uh Tom, welcome to the Rush Show.
Hey, thank you, Roger.
Wife loves ya.
Uh what I wan wanted to uh mention was uh this CAFTA deal.
I think that George Bush is uh just opening our borders more for uh the Central Americans, the illegals.
Uh him and Vincente Fox have to have something going.
Well, they do they do, and I don't like it either, Tom, but what is CAFTA?
I'm not making the connection.
What does CAFTA have to do with illegals?
They're coming anyway.
Well, they're all third world nations, Roger.
I mean, they make twenty-five to fifty cents an hour.
What does CAFTA have to do, sir, with encouraging more illegal immigration or does it?
I don't see a connection.
Well, I don't see how they can afford American products, Roger.
Uh here's how.
Let me tell you how this works.
Germany couldn't afford any American products in nineteen forty-five either, uh, because they were bombed out and uh dead and starving.
What happened was that when they got started making stuff and we bought it, uh then they started having jobs and making money, and then they started buying our stuff.
And what's going to happen in uh the trade with countries in Central America is that when we trade more with them, and uh for instance their sugar is allowed to come into the United States uh without that tariff and compete, then what's gonna happen is they're going to have better jobs, more money at home, and less reason to come to the United States illegally for a job.
They don't I don't think anybody who comes to this country illegally wants to come to the United States.
They're coming to the United States because there's no opportunity where they are.
And CAFTA at least says, look, the theory is if we trade more, and it certainly has worked with a lot of other countries we've traded with, if we trade more with the United States, we will have more money here, more jobs, more goods we can produce and send to the U.S. for consumers there.
What's wrong with that?
Well, I'm I'm thinking, Roger, that uh they have to work uh two, three days just to buy a Surline stake from up here.
So where's the quality there?
Um Sir, we already have trade with these countries, and they send us stuff and we send them stuff.
If you've been in Costa Rica and other Central American countries, there are there are American products there.
They have a middle class.
They're obviously not all that poor.
Many are, and many more will get into that middle class if they can get the kind of jobs that are available.
I have been, and I don't know whether you've been to Puerto Rico, for example.
Puerto Rico obviously a commonwealth and part of the United States, and not the best example, but I'm thinking there in Puerto Rico, because they had a duty-free situation with pharmaceuticals, all the pharmaceutical companies were down there building, making uh products in Puerto Rico, big time middle class jobs, and those middle class jobs producing people who could buy American cars, and they did, and a lot of American stuff there.
It's true uh to certain extent wherever you go, and to the extent it is true, we we wouldn't you want to make it more true?
Well, with the illegal that are coming across the border right now and not all of them are good Roger.
You don't have to convince me, Tom.
That's my that's my that's my line.
I'm just trying to get you to figure out if there's any connection between more trade and more jobs and illegals.
Wouldn't it tend to be the other way?
If you get more jobs in Nicaragua, then wouldn't fewer Nicaraguans want to come to the United States?
Well I would hope so.
Well I I think that's the way it works.
Well you're a good right now because right now I'll tell you what, Tom, right now I see Brazilians, Nicaraguans uh etc all over the streets of San Diego because they don't have any opportunity in those countries.
And they're desperate and I you know in a way I can't blame them.
They're desperate to do something to get an opportunity that they've heard so much about and they can't seem to get their own government uh to get out of the way and let them do.
And I think CAFTA is one of those things that says look drop your tariffs, increase your exports, increase your imports, increase your economic activity, let businesses come in from the United States uh partner and buy this is what China did.
I mean if China can do it and get the kind of of uh progress and growth rates what eleven, twelve, thirteen percent a year growth rates, uh then why shouldn't Nicaragua, which is desperately poor and needs jobs and money and capital and infrastructure and all that stuff that trade will allow them to afford.
I I think that's the basic argument for capta.
Are there bad things in captains?
I'm sure there are it's 24000 words.
I'm sure somewhere in there there is there are things I wouldn't like yikes here's Frank in Santa Ana California.
Frank welcome to the Rush Show.
Excuse me how you doing Roger uh Roger uh you're the voice of America for the American people.
I've just had to say that for such a long time.
I'm black.
I live here in Orange County and a member of the NAACP.
And I've made a formal proposal to two branches of the NAACP up in this area to publicly support racial profiling of black and Hispanic male youth in order to drastically reduce violent crimes, especially the senseless murders they're going.
going on right now in Southern California in your birthplace hometown of Compton California which used to be uh a predominantly black city uh there are no predominantly black cities now in California thanks to illegal immigration but and Compton a city of about uh 96,000 there
were 44 murders this year now contrast that in orange county where i live in which is the difference between night and day and everything in huntington beach population about 200 uh 5 000 people there was only one murder this century in the city of fountain valley a predominantly quite middle-class conservative uh city with a
a very good police department 78,000 people there have been no murders this century in that city and it just is common sense drive by shooters I mean you're not dealing with uh well trained al-Qaeda terrorists even though they're a chariot terrorist these are just ordinary dumb idiots in the street with guns and what do you mean by Frank let me ask you a question.
What do you mean by profiling in this context?
What do you want the police to do?
This is what I want, like, for the police to do.
If they see young black and Hispanic males between the ages of, oh, I say 15 and 30, and they're dressed, well, the hip-hop culture, they're out in the street night and day, there are, quote, warning signs, unquote, that they're not doing anything, oh, positive, they're not going to work or anything like that.
just to stop by, talk to him, hey look uh let me uh check you out to see you know if uh you're carrying any weapons or anything like that and if there's no problem and say all right thank you for your cooperation and get going.
Uh I am sure that if the police were allowed to do that, if the community would allow uh the law enforcement officer to do that, they could catch a lot of these potential murders and take them off the street and send them to CYA or even the hardcore ones to prison, and it would cut the murder rate drastically.
We had a we had a couple of uh just well, major killings almost every day.
I still remember the the murder of Nicole Williamson, uh young attractive woman in the city of Carson, which used to be a really nice middle class, upper middle class black black community.
She was it was it it wasn't even evening yet, the sun hadn't even gone down yet.
The only child of a married couple who uh lived in Carson, she was about ready to get out of her car when a group of thugs drove up in a car and shot her, killed her, and seriously wounded her friend.
And then we had another idiot, this just happened a couple of months ago.
Uh 15 year old Delish Allen, who was coming out of Locke High School, and her uh stepmother was right outside to pick her up like she always uh was, and one young eighteen year old idiot gang member was trying to shoot at another gang member.
You may make fun of the police because they can't shoot.
Uh gang numbers are a lot worse.
She missed, hit her in the head, she died a few days later.
Frank, I tell you what has happened down here in in our police uh department and became very controversial in the black community and elsewhere, and that is that we had the San Diego police department uh with a um uh officers out with uh Polaroid cameras, and they would contact uh young males, black, Hispanic, uh in some cases Vietnamese, where there were known gang hotspots, known gang areas, and they would take pictures of them.
And when they were involved then in uh criminal activity, they'd have pictures of them, and they you know, were cross-referencing these pictures in a way that was very effective in identifying among those young males which ones really were the troublemakers.
That's the problem we have the Muslim uh communities here and in Britain.
Most of them aren't the troublemakers.
How to distinguish between the two, however, is the big challenge right now.
The cops were able to do that, and then of course they had to back off that program because it was profiling, it was taking pictures.
It's an invasion of privacy, how can you do this?
And all that other whining nonsense that kept the cops from being effective.
That's what I'm uh kind of on a war uh all throughout this program and last Friday as well on this whole subject is trying to get America to wake up to what really does work.
It isn't general profiling, it isn't trying to say every young black male is going to be contacted.
It's a no.
It's in known areas with known people that you get serious about focusing on the troublemakers.
The people that are terrorists in our war on terror are not granny that you have to feel up at the airport uh for the TSA.
It's not uh the baby, it's it is young Muslim men.
This is what we're up against.
And not profiling that group to determine which ones are violent and which ones aren't, is to commit suicide.
That's my opinion.
What's yours?
We'll come back right after this.
As Rush so often says, a tiger is a tiger.
When OJ Simpson was charged with stealing um the signals of direct TV, and the uh judge ruled that the evidence was overwhelming.
OJ Simpson said he did nothing wrong.
It couldn't have been him.
And he was out looking for those who had actually stolen the direct TV signal.
Let's go to the phones.
Mitch in Montana next.
Mitch, welcome to the program.
Hi, how's it going?
Hi, good.
Um, I'm just calling on CAFSA I raised cattle up here in Montana, I've been agriculture my whole life, and I I agree with keeping the communists out of Central America and fighting Cuba, trying to do it economically, but I don't see how unless our dollar goes down to their whatever their they call their monetar their money, I can't export my cattle down there and compete against them.
It'd be like NAFTA for us.
And I just don't I mean I had to be a little bit more.
Well, what if you don't export they're not gonna import that many cows into the United States either.
What's the problem?
Well, see, they will be see the NCBA is the National Cattleman's Beef Association.
Them and the packing plants, IBP, Tyson, I think, and Cargill are all for this because they can buy the cattle like they do in Canada and Mexico cheaper than they can here.
Because we can't compete with their dollar because our dollar's stronger than them.
So I I just don't see as you know, as far as from my point of view as a rancher, it's I think it's a bad deal for us.
Well, more competition is always uncomfortable.
I understand that.
Uh I I I work in a competitive environment, for example, in radio, in which I have 40 radio stations in San Diego total that I have to compete against.
Five of them are headquartered in Mexico.
They have the X in front instead of the K. And they're uh it's five or or six that are in uh Tijuana, and of course I guess their uh operating costs are lower.
They compete in this marketplace, and I say bring it on.
Uh the fact is that if you're talking about beef that has to come up from Central America be shipped up from Central America, and then what's it gonna do?
Go into premium stakes?
No, it's probably gonna go into some kind of uh very low-end hamburger or some some kind of food product as as it goes through Cargill or any of those processors.
Uh people who are doing premium beef, pre people who are competing because their stuff is better, it's closer to market, it's better quality, it's American made.
I had the same discussion with our avocado growers in San Diego County who make a premium avocado, and they were all scared about the the Mexican imports, and indeed the Mexican imports did tend to uh reduce the price a little bit.
The Mexican imports did tend to come in and uh and and and and provide a marketplace.
But what also happened is these guys went out and marketed avocados, now people are eating avocados all over the world, and you can't produce enough avocados even with Mexico.
So it just depends on whether you're prepared, Mitch, to uh be a free market guy and compete in the free market.
Yeah, I I understand where you're coming from.
It's the cost, I guess for here the the cost of uh I guess it'd be the same as avocados, but it's just so expensive here to cover our costs as a rancher to pay the bills of taxes and to stay in business compared to someone from another country, it's just it's kinda nerve-wracking because we're under enough stress as it is to compete.
I understand.
But keep in mind if you're trying to raise cows in Nicaragua, where the government could change uh with the next election and confiscate your cows and your ranch, uh, where they could put on whatever taxes they want, where you still have to ship the product to market through ports that don't work very well, uh in refrigeration that may or may not work.
I mean, they have their own headaches, Mitch.
They've got to compete too.
I am you know it's their what I guess one of my other concerns is their health, the um the health standards for their food products coming up from those countries compared to like even Canada Canada's really got uh without the mad cow, they do they have improved with their uh their beef standards and there they don't do they even have any.
Oh, yeah, no, CAFTA would require all that same stuff that we're getting uh out of uh you know, all the stuff imported has to meet the same health standards.
So Mitch, I all I can t tell you is uh please trust freedom, please trust liberty, please trust uh that trade is gonna be good for all of us.
It'll make maybe it'll make you compete uh more as as I have to do here with radio stations.
Maybe it'll make you a better uh uh a better uh uh producer because you have to compete.
I mean the Japanese cars, as painful as that was back in the 70s and eighties, it sure made General Motors cars a lot better, didn't it?
I think so.
We'll be back with your call after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock here filling in for us today and tomorrow.
We can pick up, depending on what the House does on this CAFTA vote, we can pick this up uh tomorrow and get into it.
If I can just reduce this this this loyalty I have to the idea that liberty and freedom always win out, that competition is always good, that the free market is the best place to go for the highest quality goods at the lowest possible price.
Let me try to reduce it to an example I think everybody can understand.
Beer.
Beer wholesalers uh surveyed in uh the uh what is this, the Sunday Times indicate that there's going to be a price war here because Anheuser Bush and other companies want to sacrifice short-term profits to increase volume and perhaps market share.
Miller brewing companies say they're willing to go toe-to-toe in price discounting if necessary.
Also discounting.
What's the result?
The result is you're gonna drink higher quality beer at a lower price.
When did government ever give you that?
Back tomorrow.
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