Where would General Motors be without the United Auto Workers?
I never forget.
Only when I want to forget do I forget.
We are back at EIB Network, America's anchor man, Rush Limbaugh Friday.
It is live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open live Friday.
Hey, goody goody gum drums, yip, yip, yip, yip, yahoo, hubba, hubba, hubba, dooba-duba, and all that.
Basically, the rule is this.
When we go to the phones, the show is yours.
Whatever you want to talk about, whatever allegation you want to make about me or anybody else, whatever question you might have, whatever comment on anything that you might want to make.
800-282282 if you'd like to be on the program today.
One last story here on the visit to Washington by President Wu.
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post today, China and its president greeted by a host of indignities.
Dana Milbank's heart goes out to Wu.
Chinese President Hu Xintao got almost everything he wanted out of yesterday's visit to the White House.
He got 21-gun salute.
He got the review of the troops, the colonial fife and drum corpse.
He got the exchange of toasts and a meal of wild-caught Alaskan halibut.
Isn't that what Bill Gates served?
Wow, halibut twice in one week.
I guess it's better than not eating.
With mushroom essence, $50 Chardonnay, and live bluegrass music.
And he got an Oval Office photo op with President Bush, who nodded and smiled as if he understood Chinese while Hu spoke.
If I'm not mistaken, there was a translator in there.
Nevertheless, this is not what Hu wanted.
Who wanted a state dinner?
He wanted official state visit.
He wanted a big nighttime gala.
He wanted all that he got plus more.
The Bushies originally wanted a five-day or four-day working summit in Crawford, Texas, and who didn't want any part of that for reasons we went into yesterday.
He mentioned it in his speech.
I translated it for you.
If only the White House, continues Mr. Middlebank, if only the White House hadn't given press credentials to a Faloon Gong activist who five years ago heckled Hu's predecessor, Zhang Zimen, in Malta.
Sure enough, 90 seconds into Hu's speech in a south lawn, a woman started shrieking, President Hu, your days are numbered and President Bush stop him from killing.
Bush and Hu looked up stunned.
Took so long to silence her, full three minutes, that Bush aides began to wonder if the Secret Service's strategerie was to let her scream herself hoarse.
The rattled Chinese president haltingly attempted to continue his speech, and television coverage went split screen.
You're okay, Bush gently reassured Hu, but he wasn't okay, not really.
The protocol-obsessed Chinese leaders suffered a full day of indignities.
Some of them intentional, some just careless.
Can we go back to the third paragraph here for just a moment, ladies and gentlemen?
If only the White House hadn't given press credentials to a Faloon Gong activist who five years ago heckled who's can we reverse this?
Let's take President Bush back in China.
Let's put him back over to China.
And let's say that Bush gets heckled in this way by, let's say Cindy Sheehan goes over, Sen American goes somewhere and starts heckling Bush over whatever.
Do you think that the U.S. media would write stories about the indignities suffered by President Bush and the lack of planning and security on the part of the Chikons?
Do you think that would know?
Whoever had made the protest and the heckle would have been discovered and would be made a star.
That person will be brought back home first class by the drive-by media to make all the appearances on all the Sunday shows.
This is so hypocritical.
When you people in the media don't understand why people think you're liberal, this is it.
This is a classic example of how we all know that you are.
Just admit it.
This is crying tears over President Hu, like he's a victim himself, can't handle himself.
The visit began with a slight when the official announcer said the band would play the national anthem of the Republic of China.
Problem is, that's the official name of Taiwan.
I think that's kind of funny.
It continued when Vice President Cheney donned sunglasses for the ceremony.
And again, when Hu, attempting to leave the stage via the wrong staircase, was yanked back by his jacket.
He looked down at his sleeve to see the president of the U.S. tugging at it as if redirecting an errant child.
Then there were the intentional slights.
China wanted a formal visit, state visit, such as Zhang Zemen got, but the administration refused, calling it instead an official visit.
Bush acquiesced in a 21-gun salute, but insisted on a luncheon instead of a formal dinner in the East Room instead of the state dining room.
Even the visiting country's flags were missing from the lampposts near the White House.
But as protocol breaches go, it's hard to top the heckling of a foreign leader at the White House.
Explaining the incident, White House and Secret Service officials said that she was a legitimate journalist and that there was nothing suspicious in her background.
In other words, who knew?
Well, who did?
The Chinese had warned the White House to be careful about who was admitted to the ceremony, but to no avail.
They granted a one-day pass to Wang Wen Yi of the Fulung Gong publication Epoch Times.
A quick Nexus search shows that in 2001, she slipped through a security cordon in Malta protecting Zhang Zemen and got into an argument with him.
The 47-year-old pathologist is expected to be charged today with attempting to harass a foreign official.
She's just no different than Helen Thomas.
The protester was a journalist.
She's no different.
Helen Thomas does this every time there's a White House press briefing.
Is she just Chinese?
It's just, it's just amazing.
So Cheney wore sunglasses.
How disrespectful.
Where would General Motors be without the United Automobile Workers?
This is an interesting piece here by George Reisman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.
It's a question no one seems to be asking, and so I've asked it, and here in essence is what I think is the answer.
First, General Motors without the UAW would be without the so-called Monday morning automobiles.
That is, automobiles poorly made for no other reason than because they happen to be made on a day when too few workers showed up or too few showed up sober to do the jobs they were paid to do.
Without the UAW, General Motors would simply have fired such workers and replaced them with ones who would do the jobs that they were paid to do.
And so without correspondingly greater sales volume, so without the UAW, GM would have produced more reliable, higher quality cars, had a better reputation for quality, and correspondingly greater sales volume to go with it.
Why didn't they do this?
Well, because the UAW would not let it happen.
Second, without the UAW, GM would have been free to produce in the most efficient, lowest cost way and to introduce improvements in efficiency as rapidly as possible.
Sometimes this would have meant simply having one or two workers on the spot to do a variety of simple jobs that need doing without having to call in half a dozen different workers each belonging to a different union job classification and having to pay that much more to get the same job done.
I'm excerpting this.
We'll link to it at RussiaLimbaugh.
In fact, we did yesterday.
It should be on the site now.
Third, without the UAW, GM would have an average unit cost per automobile close to that of non-union Toyota.
Toyota makes a profit of about $2,000 per vehicle, while General Motors suffers a loss of about $1,200 per vehicle, a difference of $3,200 per unit.
GM suffers a loss of $1,200 per car.
And the far greater part of that difference is the result of nothing but GMs being forced to deal with the UAW.
Well, look, nobody pointed a gun to their head.
I mean, there have been some executives in the past that made these deals with the UAW.
They're not innocent entirely.
Fourth, without the UAW, the cost of employing a GM factory worker, including wages and fringes, would not be in excess of $72 per hour, which is where it is today, according to the Post-Crescent newspaper of Appleton, Wisconsin.
Fifth, as a result of UAW coercion and extortion, GM has lost billions upon billions of dollars.
2005 alone, it reported a loss in excess of 10 billion.
Sixth, without the UAW, GM would not now be in a process of attempting to pay a ransom to its UA workers of up to $140,000 per man just to get them to quit and take their hands out of their pockets.
It believes that $140,000 is less than what they will steal if they remain.
Seventh, without the UAW, GM would not now have health care obligations that count for more than $1,600 of the cost of every vehicle it produces.
Eighth, without the UAW, GM would not now have pension obligations, which, if entered on its balance sheet in accordance with the rule now being proposed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, will leave it with a net worth of minus $16 billion.
I didn't know that.
You've got to put the pension obligations on the balance sheet.
Their net worth plummets to minus $16 billion.
Ninth, without the UAW, tens of thousands of workers, its own members, would not now be faced with the loss of pension and healthcare benefits that it is impossible for GM or any of the other auto companies to provide and never was possible for them to provide.
The UAW, the whole labor union movement, the left liberal intellectual establishment, which is their father and mother, are responsible for foisting on the public and on the average working man and woman a fantasy land of imaginary demons, big business and the rich, and of saintly good fairies, politicians, government officials, and union leaders.
In this fantasyland, the good fairies supposedly have the power to wring unlimited free benefits from the demons.
Tenth, without the UAW and its fantasy land mentality, auto workers would have been motivated to save out of wages actually paid to them and to provide for their future by means of, by and large, reasonable investments of those savings.
It's very sad to watch an innocent human being suffer.
It's dreadful to contemplate anyone's life being ruined.
It's dreadful to contemplate even an imbecile's falling off a cliff or down a well.
But the union members and their union leaders, the politicians who catered to them, the journalists, the writers, the professors who provided the intellectual cultural environment in which this calamity could take place, none of them were imbeciles.
They all could have and should have known better, in some.
Without the UAW, General Motors would not be faced with extinction.
Instead, it would almost certainly be a vastly larger, far more prosperous company producing more and better cars than ever before at far lower costs of production and prices than it does today and providing employment to hundreds of thousands more workers than it does today.
Again, this is George Reisman.
Just excerpts.
He's from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
A brief timeout.
Open line Friday, and your phone calls continue next.
America's anchorman, Rush Limbaugh, your highly trained broadcast specialist.
Here at the EIB Southern Command behind the golden EIB microphone to Miami, this is Colin.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the program.
I finally got to talk to the emperor himself.
Yes.
Well, okay, 99 times out of 100, I agree with you.
But a few weeks ago, you said something that really bothered me.
You're opposed to the Cuban embargo.
Now, are you there?
Yeah.
Sorry.
Here's what gets me.
You look at how Cuba provides technical assistance to Iran.
They built a biotechnology center in Tehran.
You had a Cuban spy who was in the Pentagon and had access to civil defense information.
You have the Cuban government on their own webpage saying that Castro went to Iran to promote union against the U.S.
Now, that disappeared on September 12, 2001.
But up until then, they bragged about it on their webpage.
Then you look at the huge increase in trade between Venezuela and the U.S.
It's gone to the point trade has increased to such an extent that you mean Cuba and Venezuela?
No, no, the U.S. and Venezuela.
Because the U.S. is purchasing massive amounts of petroleum from Venezuela to such an extent that the traditional left in Venezuela.
Well, I mean, the embargo is really working, isn't it?
No, but from Venezuela.
Oh, but the embargo.
Look, with or without democracy, with or without capitalism, I don't think Cuba has a future.
What counts is American national security.
And when you look at how Chavez is using all of the money he gets from the U.S. to subsidize subversion, why in the world would you want money to go to Cuba to do the same thing?
Well, here's my basic thinking on the Cuban embargo is if it makes sense in Cuba, then why don't we have an embargo with China?
It should.
Why don't we have an embargo with the Soviet Union when they were still around?
Why do we trade with any of these so-called constructive engagement policy say of opening up China and trickling in some free market capitalism there to try to eventually provide us?
It's working, that's why.
Well, no, but we don't know that it isn't.
It is working.
And besides which, I understand what you're saying, but here's the problem.
If you look at Cuba, with or without democracy, with or without capitalism, the situation is much worse than you imagine.
To give you an example, the Cuban government admits that most of their soils are worthless nowadays because Casper wanted three sugarcane harvests a year, so they implemented slash and burnout.
I know that.
The Cuban cigars have gone to hell.
Right.
And on top of that, you've got a tremendous – do you know that for every 100 girls born, 118 boys are born because of gender-based abortions?
Look, you don't – You don't have to educate me on what the place is a state prison.
No, it's much worse than that.
As far as the country having a chance in the future, that's pretty much over.
The only thing I care about is U.S. security.
So when you looked at if Iran is the threat, then the technical assistance Cuba provides Iran should be a threat.
What technical assistance?
What?
The biotechnology center that they built in Tehran.
Well, how good can it be for crying out loud?
We're talking about Cuba here.
Oh, well, it's good enough for the U.S. to have been worried about it.
Well, then we didn't do anything to stop it.
No, you didn't.
We can sit around and be worried about it all day long if we're going to get to do anything about it.
Yep, yep.
Well, then why do you want to subsidize?
Do you think it's good?
Do you remember when the Bush administration?
Wait a minute.
Yeah, wait a second.
Now, I'm worried.
I'm not angry.
Don't worry.
No, I'm just saying, I don't want to subsidize anything they're doing.
That's not the point of restricting the embargo.
I just haven't had anybody give me a good reason for it.
I think it's a legacy embargo that goes back to JFK.
Nobody's got the guts to change it.
And there's a, of course, you've got a very strong exile community in Miami that is against lifting it, and they carry a lot of political weight.
And I understand their reasons for it.
When Castro dies, when something happens down there to change this, the first thing that's going to happen is that the exile community is going to want to go back and reclaim their land.
Oh, that's what they think.
But what they don't understand is that the situation is 10 times worse than they imagine.
There really isn't that much to work with.
That's the problem.
If I thought that Cuba had a real future, then I would understand your point.
The problem is, it really doesn't.
Now, that's a bit extreme to say that Cuba does not have any future ever.
That's exactly right.
No.
Let me give you an example.
Let me give you an obvious example.
The Cuban government is the first to admit that 70% of their soils are worthless nowadays.
Cuban agriculture is beyond remedy.
You have a gender imbalance that's created tremendous social problems.
You have levels of violence that aren't even supposed to exist in totalitarian societies.
Let me ask you this: you know, the massive trade between Venezuela and the U.S. is.
Okay, you think that's a good idea when they're out there subsiding.
Do you remember when Bush got really upset?
You know something?
But here's, look, you can advance these intellectual arguments, but I could retort that it makes as little sense to trade with Venezuela as it does with the Saudis.
And it doesn't.
Well, actually, you know what we should do?
We should be drilling in Alaska.
Well, of course.
That's what we should be doing.
Don't tell me.
We ought to be drilling in the Gulf.
Instead, Castro is.
That's exactly what we should be doing.
Well, we're not going to do it as long as we've got the current political balance in this country.
As long as the environmentalists in this country continue to intimidate politicians and lie the American people and get them all worked up about pollution, when our country is cleaner than it's ever been.
I've got a story here about global warming.
It's a little adjunct to this.
I'm telling you, the global warming movement's falling apart because none of the allegations they've made about pollution that we're creating are true.
I'll get to this, in fact, after the next break.
But the reality of the situation is when we have this desperate need for imported oil, and it's pretty desperate, and we need it when we can get it, and it is the engine of our fuel of the engine of our freedom.
It isn't hybrids, and it isn't alternatives, and it's not ethanol, and it's not.
I saw some people putting cooking oil in their cars these days.
They're spending two grand to adapt the engines, putting cooking oil in there just to save money on gasoline.
That's not the answer.
The answer is our own domestic supply of oil.
And until we don't have this great dependency, we don't have the luxury of waving goodbye to all these reprobates.
Have you seen the preview from the New York Times on their Sunday magazine story about Madeline Albright?
In an interview in the New York Times magazine, it'll appear Sunday.
Madeleine Albright reveals, among other things, that even at age 68, she works out three times a week and can leg press up to 400 pounds.
This follows a discussion of how she does not expect to remarry, partly because, as she says, I'm intimidating, don't you think?
I actually don't think that's the problem, but we'll leave it there.
So she can leg press 400 pounds.
That is that's the no, you do it on a machine, Mr. Snurdle.
It's not who's she leg pressing.
It's, of course, maybe that's why she's not remarried.
I don't know, but that's just not something you want to create a mental image of, is it?
Another highlight in the QA is her commentary on the fact that her father, Josef Korbel, or maybe Korbel, a Czech diplomat who became dean of the School of International Relations at the University of Denver, happened to train two future secretaries of state.
The other was Condoleezza Rice.
Albright says, what I really like about her is that she continues to give credit to the fact that my father had a big influence on her.
That's what she likes about Condoleezza.
So she can leg press 400 pounds, works out three times a week, probably isn't going to get married.
Thank you, the New York Times and the Sunday magazine.
Can't wait for the accompanying photos.
All right, here are the two global warming stories.
And you know, it's interesting.
Let me check.
The first one comes from Duke University.
Duke, yes, yes, it does.
Actually, the first story is from a 2005 Duke University study.
Sun's direct role in global warming may be underestimated, Duke physicists report.
How long before somebody accuses these guys of being rapists?
Well, that's what happens, you know, when you go off the liberal reservation.
They come after you.
At least 10 to 30 percent of global warming measured during the past two decades may be due to increased solar output rather than factors such as increased heat-absorbing carbon dioxide gas released by various human activities, to Duke University Physicists report.
They go on to demonstrate here through science and objective thinking why the hysteria of the left regarding the misnomer global warming is as I have always said, it's political.
Scaremongering on the Earth's climate is not based on science.
And the reason that they can get away with it is because science and math, as we all know, is horribly taught in this country.
Everyone look at the science and math scores.
We know they're horrible.
United States near the bottom of the heap in industrialized nations when it comes to teaching and learning science and math.
The second story was in the Washington Times today.
Global warming may not be as dramatic as some scientists have predicted.
Scientists cool their outlook on global warming using temperature readings from the past 100 years.
1,000 computer situations and the evidence left in ancient tree rings.
Duke University scientists announced yesterday that the magnitude of future global warming will likely fall well short of current highest predictions.
They're not predictions, they're wild guesses.
Supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, the Duke researchers noted that some observational studies predicted that the Earth's temperature could rise as much as 16 degrees in this century because of an increase in carbon dioxide, man-made greenhouse gases.
The Duke estimates show that the chances the planet's temperature will rise even by 11 degrees is only 5%, which falls in line with previous, less alarming predictions that meteorologists made almost three decades ago.
Marked climate change in other centuries resulted from external forcing, said the Duke findings.
At any rate, you do now have some scientific community members from elite leftist institutions now who are worried about their reputations, and I would think a lot of scientists would be who want to get lumped in with this mad dash to insanity that is based purely on politics and money.
And then National Geographic News, climate less sensitive to greenhouse gases than predicted, study says.
How sensitive is Earth's climate?
Sufficient to warm by at least several degrees in response to greenhouse gas pollution, but perhaps not as sensitive as some scientists have feared, according to a new study.
Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much the global temperature will warm in response to greenhouse gas emissions, explained Gabrielle Hegerel.
Hegerel, that's right, a climate scientist at Duke University.
That's happening here.
Duke University is trying to corner the market in anti-global warming news.
I wonder if we will ever hear of these people again in a professional sense.
The study's results refute recent research suggesting that the climate may be susceptible to extreme increases in temperature, but Hegerel cautions that the findings do not diminish the threat of global warming.
Oh, of course they don't diminish the threat.
No, no, no.
Climate may not be as susceptible to it, and it may not be as bad, but we can't deny there's global warming.
Now, you know what's happening as the leftist environmental wackos hear this and other leftist intellectuals and they find out that all this contrary study and data is coming from Duke within the context of the Duke rape case.
You just know that the left has got somebody out there saying, I knew there was something wrong at Duke.
Everybody thinks it's this rape thing, but it's their science department.
I knew there's something wrong at Duke.
Oh, and then there's this from the Associated Press.
In what appears to be an amazing success for American medicine, preliminary government figures released yesterday showed that the annual number of deaths in the U.S. dropped by nearly 50,000 in 2004.
That's the biggest year-to-year decline in nearly 70 years.
The 2% decrease reported by the National Center for Health Statistics came as a shock to many experts because the U.S. population is increasing.
It's growing older and getting fatter.
It just means the experts are wrong.
It means the climate isn't killing us.
It means we've got the best health care system in the world, and all we have is a crisis-panic-oriented community on the left that gins up doom and gloom every day.
We all know the life expectancy is increasing.
We all know people are living longer.
How does this story even get written?
As though it's news.
The headline here, Americans are suddenly dying less often.
What a headline.
Americans are suddenly dying less often, early data suggest.
I swear, folks, these people are just, it's just, I don't care whether it's jobs numbers or it's economic numbers or whatever numbers we're talking about.
The experts are always shocked because they're obsessed with pessimism and negative, almost the whole movement now.
Liberalism is almost apocalyptic.
It's gone beyond just mere pessimism and doom and gloom.
They're just a bunch of apocalyptic dead-enders.
Here's Annie in Santa Barbara.
Annie, I'm glad you called.
You are on Open Line Friday.
Actually, it's Arnie.
Arnie, you know what?
I'm sorry I didn't have my glasses on.
No problem.
I apologize.
Anyway, I want to respond to a comment, some comments you were making yesterday discounting the impact of environmentalists.
And I want to use two words, Walmart.
I think we're all familiar with that horrible corporation.
Well, anyway, they are installing a green roof this summer on their Chicago store.
What do you mean a green roof?
A green roof is one of these, as you would call it, environmental wacko ideas in which you plant a garden on top of a roof.
The idea is it will make the building more energy efficient.
It'll take care of water management since there won't be as much runoff.
And there are studies that show it can reduce the temperature in the surrounding area.
And the executives have a place to go on break.
Well, I mean, that's one way to look at it.
It's definitely more aesthetically pleasing.
But my point is that...
I hope they put a putting green up there, too.
Um...
I think these environmentalist wackos are getting their point across.
Last year, this movie, Walmart, The High Cost of Low Price, I'm sure you're familiar with it, that documentary Blasting Walmart was produced.
Propaganda.
Propaganda.
You don't think Walmart's responding to this because of environmental reasons, do you?
They're responding to this to keep people off their back.
It's not because they necessarily agree with this.
It's no different than businesses contributing to both political parties.
It's an extortion racket.
Look what happened to Bill Gates when he forgot to have a lobbyist.
Hey, it's Walmart, you know, and you can say there are a lot of reasons for doing this.
It comes down to money in many cases, but the environmentalists have made the point.
It's to avoid being shaken down and hassled, harassed, and all kinds of things.
What's wrong with Walmart from your perspective?
I'm not here to blast Walmart.
I'm not an expert on the problems of Walmart.
You know, I've heard...
Watch the movie.
You started out by, you sounded somewhat sarcastic when you mentioned the name.
I don't know if you're not sarcastic as you might in talking about how environmentalists look at Walmart.
Yeah, but I can tell you why I don't like environmentalists.
I'm an expert on it.
You're ripping Walmart here, but you want to tell me that you're not.
I'm not ripping Walmart at all.
I'm supporting Walmart and their green initiatives.
I think it's wonderful.
It's not their business.
See, you'll applaud them for doing the things that actually mean nothing to their business.
Well, that's wonderful, because the whole point of environmentalism is to look beyond what it does for our business.
They look at the triple bottom line, which is a new way of doing accounting, something I'm sure you're not familiar with.
Of course not.
I don't know anything.
I'm just the host.
Let me tell you something.
Let me tell you what the purpose of environmentalism is.
It's a new home for renegade communists who don't have the Soviet Union to call home anymore.
It's a platform from which you can launch a bunch of anti-capitalism measures, make yourselves feel like you've got meaning in your life and like you're doing something that matters, something that has deep meaning so you don't feel like you're wandering through life aimlessly, but all you're doing is targeting the most successful capitalistic ventures you can find, private property rights, and trying to tell people that by living their lives normally, they're destroying the planet.
Environmentalists are lying to people in this country every day, in and out.
They've jimmed up a bunch of fear and doom and gloom based on phony science.
And this business of putting a garden on a building, if it's going to make a smithereens bit of difference, is irrelevant, is that they're being forced to do it in order to keep people out of their back pocket, suing them left and right, bad PR and so forth.
It's not because they probably believe in this great cause because it makes no sense to put a garden on the top of a building and have tremendous meaningful environmental impact.
It's ridiculous.
Well, the barrel price per oil, the oil price per barrel up now to $74, ladies and gentlemen.
Only $26 to go to get to the cherished price of $100 a barrel that Tom Friedman urged on the world earlier this week.
$74 barrel of oil.
I want to throw these green roofs for a second, folks, because I, El Rushbo used to live under one.
When I bought my fashionable Upper East Saud apartment in Manhattan and lived near the top of the building, but not at the top, the building tapered at the top.
The apartments got smaller up there above mine, the actual living space.
But so these people had a lot of deck space and patio space.
People upstairs planted gardens.
Had gardens up there.
Fine, I don't care.
I don't go up there and see them.
One week, one week after moving in, after a year and a half of renovations, one week, I'm in the shower.
It's about 9:30 at night.
A huge gully washer of a thunderstorm went through, and three rooms were ruined because the construction of the gardens upstairs was faulty.
And there was no drainage for the water, and it all came down into a kitchen, a master bedroom, and half of the living room, out for the dining room.
After being in there one week, after a year and a half of renovation.
Yeah, it was wonderful.
And I'm here to tell you that whatever was up there didn't do diddly squat for the environment.
It didn't matter, a hill of beans.
It doesn't reduce my air conditioning costs.
All it did was flood my apartment.
And it took two years to get this fixed.
People upstairs denied it was their problem.
They blame the building.
The building says, ah, we have nothing to do with it.
So it was an absolute disaster.
It was a mess.
All because of the trees up there.
And guard.
Well, the way this has been resolved was that the whole thing was ripped up up there and rebuilt.
The construction had been, it was horrible.
It was not done right.
They had forgot to put something called a membrane under the whole sand.
It was just nothing but sand up there.
There was nowhere for the water to go.
There's nothing but sand.
And so the water pooled and it had nowhere to go.
There was no drainage.
And, you know, it didn't happen to anybody's apartment but mine.
None but mine.
Well, I don't know who built it.
I don't want to get it.
It's the union.
I'm just telling you that.
Look, the EIB Northern Command, the EIB building, I'm not going to say exactly where it is.
Everybody knows anyway.
One of the most frequent tourist stops and stops in the city, but not far away because we're up high enough, you can see Radio City, and we can see 30 Rock where NBC is.
And they've got gardens in parts of it, but nobody's ever there.
They don't allow anybody into it that I've never seen.
I'm sure the executives go up there after the sun goes down for some whoopee.
But I think the help may go up there and is that right?
The help sleeps there.
Oh, the help uses for, but it's not the whole top of the building.
It's nice.
A very small portion.
So now green roofs now, huh?
Green roofs.
Well, I'm just telling you, I have been victimized by one of these.
And it was, I didn't talk about this when it, I mean, I talked about the flooding, but I didn't get into detail about why.
And so, folks, I can't tell you.
I was livid.
I was indescribably angry.
All this cockamame, feel-good, liberal do-gooderism is just that and nothing more.
Try this.
British authorities are spending taxpayers' money to rebuild prison toilets so that Muslim inmates don't have to face Mecca while using them.
The Islamic religion prohibits Muslims from facing or turning their backs in the direction of prayer when they use the toilet.
Muslim inmates complain they have to sit sideways on prison toilets to comply with that prohibition.
Aha!
Torture!
Having to sit sideways on a toilet because you can't face Mecca.
When you pray, so they're going to totally go in there and reorient the toilets in British prisons.
Let's plant a garden in those British prisons where they're going to re-aim the toilets so that Muslim prisoners don't have to pray facing the wrong direction while on the toilet.