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Feb. 5, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
February 5, 2009, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
Yes, it's me.
I'm back.
Am I back by popular demand by any chance?
Uh really.
I'm back by popular demand.
Or was it just demand?
Or yeah, how much how much demand really was there?
I haven't done the show in over a year.
In that time, how many requests have you had to have me back when Rush wasn't here?
Five.
Well, that's some popular demand.
I am back, I think because they couldn't find anybody else to do the program.
This is guest host week on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Rush took like no vacations through all of 2008 because it was very, very important for Rush to be here to help talk us through the election.
A lot of good it did.
But he's now gone.
Do we know where he is?
Is that or is that?
You know, but you will not say.
Golfing or anything like that.
The names of the Bernie Madoff victims are out today.
Uh they're on Drudge, New York Daily News and a couple the page, it's 162 pages of small type, all those names that are on there, and they've got all these addresses in.
Swear, like two-thirds of them are from Palm Beach.
I mean, Rush isn't gonna have anybody to golf with anymore.
I mean, his whole social life's going to be messed up because of this.
The economy is rough.
It is rough.
But we need to step back here a minute.
Everybody wants me to talk about a couple of things.
And since my audience back in Milwaukee knew that I was going to come on and do the rush program, you're gonna talk about this, you're gonna talk about that.
The staff's talking with me about what I ought to talk about.
There's something that we have to talk about first, even though nobody wants to hear it.
I'm gonna take an unpopular position here, but it's got to be said, out of all the things Obama is doing, the absolute most dangerous is what's going on right now with these limits on executive compensation.
And I know what everybody's thinking, those Wall Street guys were paid too much.
They loot their companies, they run their companies into the ground, and they're getting all these multi-zillion dollar bonuses.
If they're gonna get a bailout, they shouldn't be able to get all that.
That's what everybody thinks.
I know that.
It's more important than that.
Every single terrible decision this country has ever made started with the best of intentions because we overreacted to a problem.
In fact, I'm willing to bet if you look at your own personal life, you take the five worst decisions you've ever made.
All of them came as a result of an overreaction to something.
I know it's the case with me.
We are overreacting here and we are heading down a path that will be absolutely disastrous.
I know whenever a right winger talks about talks like this and starts mentioning the S word, oh yeah, I'm gonna talk about socialism again.
Well, what if it actually is socialism?
Hosting my own program in Milwaukee.
Every now and then over the years, you get a caller when I'd be talking about something or another who would overstate things.
Say, well, you know, this country's just headed towards socialism.
Okay, fine, you're taking it a little far here.
Right now, we're not.
This is socialism.
Here's the problem.
Once the government starts giving anyone money, and I don't care who it is, be it local aid to some city somewhere or a school district, they've got these all these strings attached.
Now, since the government is going to give money to all these industries and all these companies that are in trouble, the government's going to start telling them what to do and telling them how to run their businesses.
And it starts with things that everybody agrees with, like have a limit on executive compensation.
And it even seems reasonable.
If you're going to receive TARP money from the bailout fund, if we're going to be bailing out the banks, we're going to put some limits on how you can spend the money.
We're going to limit executives to $500,000 in direct salary.
Anything beyond that they have to take in Stock and only if the stock goes up.
But as long as they're receiving money, we're going to limit how much money they can take in.
And that seems so reasonable.
After all, if they're accepting corporate welfare, if they're feeding at the trough, we ought to be able to have some limits as to how much they're going to pay those fat cats.
That sounds like such a good idea.
It's not.
Just look at what's happened over the last week.
Citigroup is under all sorts of pressure from liberals to take its name off the new New York Mets baseball stadium.
They're tearing Shay Stadium down.
I know that they're tearing it down because I saw it as I drove in, came in from the airport.
It's literally wreckage.
They've got the new stadium they're building right next door.
What are they going to call it?
City Park or City Stadium or whatever, Citigroup paid the naming rights and a major sponsorship package to be associated with that baseball stadium.
And all these lefties, which now includes the administration of the United States, are saying that it is ridiculous that this company that is receiving bailout funds is frivolously spending it on a baseball stadium.
Okay, so now we're telling Citigroup how they can spend their marketing dollars.
The reason they want their name on that stadium is because they think that they can get some value out of it.
That's why corporations advertise.
Now we're going to tell the banks how much they can pay their executives.
How much more are we going to tell them?
Look how we got into the mess in the first place.
We got into this mess when government created institutions like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, private companies that the government already had its finger in by chartering, started encouraging the making of bad loans, the subprime mortgages.
That's where this all started.
Government pressure to do something that seemed like a good thing.
Let's let everybody get involved in the home ownership deal.
That's how it started.
So now we're going to tell companies whether or not they can put their names on sports stadiums?
We're going to tell them how much they can pay their employees.
How far do we go?
We all know that bank fees are a pain in the butt.
Is the government going to tell them if they get bailout funds, that they can't charge fees for ATM usage, they can't charge more than this amount to maintain the checking account?
How far do we take that?
A lot of banks have their names on sports stadiums.
Do they not get to do that anymore?
Are we going to tell them whether or not they can rent luxury suites at sports stadiums?
Are we just going to have the government of the United States telling every company that gets any amount of bailout money what they can and can't do with their cash?
If you're suggesting that the government gets to boss companies around and make policies for them, we are buying into total socialism.
And it's not going to stop with the banks.
You take a look at this bailout, which they're carpet bombing America with, there are going to be all sorts of companies that one way or another are going to get bailout money or stimulus money.
Once we establish the notion that if you take any money from government, government gets to tell you how to run your business, we've nationalized all of them.
What if Bank of America goes under?
What's the stock of Bank of America?
It's down.
There are fears that it might have to be nationalized.
I doubt that that's going to occur, but nobody knows how bad the situation at Bank of America is because of all the garbage that they inherited from Merrill Lynch.
So if the government nationalizes that bank and we have a government-run bank that's out there, how much bigger of a step is it to say that they get to tell everybody else in the banking business how they run their operations?
Health care.
Obama wants to create socialized medicine.
Does that mean we're going to tell all the hospital companies and all the drug companies how they can spend their money?
This is a very bad path we're going on.
And it's easy to buy into it now because right now everybody hates corporate America.
Big business caused this recession.
We're all going bust because of big business, and we need somebody like President Obama to tell them what to do.
They're out of control, they're spending too much money.
I don't deny any of that.
And there's been a whole lot of bad decisions Being made in many of these boardrooms, particularly in some of the large banks and the investment banks and on Wall Street.
Terrible decisions.
The way to deal with that is not to have government come in and start telling them how to run their business.
Do you really want Barack Obama to tell businesses how to run their operations?
What has he ever run ever?
What experience does he have in any corporation?
Businesses will make bad decisions, businesses will make good decisions.
The businesses that make bad decisions are the ones that are going to be punished.
Do you know what the check here ought to be?
It's the one that we already have in place.
You overpay an executive who makes dumb decisions.
You know what happens?
The stock price goes right down into the basement.
What was the stock of Merrill Lynch when they were finally bought out by Bank of America?
The shareholders were virtually wiped out.
With Covia.
The shareholders were virtually wiped out.
Look at Citigroup.
Where is it not right now around?
Four bucks, maybe?
Shareholders have badly suffered.
That's the way it ought to be.
If people buy stock in a firm that is badly managed or makes bad decisions, the shareholders are going to be hammered, and that's where the pressure has to be on management to properly run its operations.
To have government come in and start setting all these rules about what companies can and cannot do is nothing more than socialism.
It is injecting, not only is it putting government into private businesses, it's putting them at the top of private businesses.
The board of directors doesn't get to decide how much we're going to pay the people.
The government is going to decide.
Because the government knows better.
So every company now that's going to apply for bailout money.
Did I read somewhere the newspapers want a bailout?
Everybody wants a bailout.
With that is going to come strings.
And this is a very, very dangerous path we're headed down.
As reasonable as it sounds, we ought to say no to it.
My name is Mark Belling, and I am your guest host today on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush 1800-28282 is the telephone number.
Do not misunderstand me here.
I'm a long time critic of Wall Street.
I've never understood why we even needed investment banks.
A big part of the collapse of the economy after the subprime mortgages was because a lot of these large banks were totally over-leveraged with phony derivative instruments that were tied to subprime mortgages.
And a lot of those people are overpaid.
And the role of a lot of the big brokerages, including some of those that have been swallowed up like Merrill Lynch, have been negative in this country.
My point is, is that if we're going to use the notion of bailing companies out as a pretense to then tell them how to run their operations, we are socializing this country.
And given the fact that this bailout is being thrown all over the place and everybody's going to be in line for it, it's opening the door to government running private businesses.
And that's what socialism is.
It's not going to work.
It will be disastrous.
And once we create this sense that businesses have to do what government tells them to do in basic decisions on how much you can pay people, we'll never turn back from that.
Burlington, Vermont and Scooter, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, thanks a lot for taking my call.
Thank you.
Hey, listen, I would just I want to kind of pose sort of an antithesis to what you're saying.
I consider myself an extreme free market capitalist.
But look, I think that this is what we've now accepted.
In other words, this bailout, I mean, federal money never comes without strings attached.
I know.
I mean, I mean, the only thing I can think of is tax cuts, and even that sometimes has restrictions.
But in other words, we've elected our leader who has chosen this route.
I mean, well, Bush actually did before him to degree with the TARP thing, but we've elected a leader who's choosing who's chosen this route, and now we're crying out that we don't want it.
That that we don't want to do.
Well, are you suggesting that because we've chosen Obama, I'm not supposed to say anything about anything he wants to do?
no, no, no, no.
Not at all.
Not at all.
But I know we've chosen this route.
I'm just saying it's scary.
I'm not even saying that we have any chance of stopping it with regard to what you know, government sticking its beak into all of these businesses.
I'm merely telling you that it's going to be disastrous when we have the Barney Franks of the world sticking their noses in to all sorts of American businesses on the pretense that if you get government money, there are going to be strings attached, and those strings now include how much you can pay people, what you can advertise on, what your corporate policies are going to be.
There's no end to this.
Right.
But Mark, can I just offer one self-correcting hopeful prospect of this?
Sure.
The only thing that we can hope for is that government restrictions, limitations, corporate welfare is so awful.
There's is the the cheese, if I could say so, and the food stamps are so bad and so restricting that any future corporation that is even thinking about getting a bailout will think otherwise.
Well, now that's an excellent point.
In fact, Goldman Sachs, which is part of the bailout, they're going to be getting they're they're getting government assistance here, and it's probably the best run of any of the Wall Street firms.
They're saying they want to pay back the money as soon as they can.
In fact, I have a quote here from David Vinyards, CFO of Goldman Sachs.
He told Bloomberg News that his firm wants to repay the government as quickly as feasible to be under less scrutiny and under less pressure.
They want to get rid of this money as soon as they can give it back as soon as they can, because they don't want the government breathing down their necks.
I'm just saying it's going to be very, very hard once we create this, set this precedent that the government's going to start telling companies how much they can pay people to ever get out from underneath it.
But you're right, if you aren't receiving any money from the government, it's going to be harder for them to do it.
I know that this door has already been opened.
We have government telling companies whether or not they can allow smoking in their buildings.
We have government that sets minimum wage laws.
Government is all over business as it is.
But now we're talking about internal management decisions.
With regard to the criticism of Citigroup for putting its name on the New York Met Stadium, you're talking about a marketing decision.
Are we now going to tell companies that they can't advertise in the Super Bowl because the ad rates are too expensive?
You're getting bailout money to run that, or your commercial is stupid?
Or how about this one?
Why, if we're going to give you bailout money, you can't advertise on programs that promote hate, like Rush Limbaugh's program, there is no end to how far we can go with this once we open the door to saying that because you're getting government assistance, we now reserve the right to tell you how you're going to run your businesses.
Thanks, Scooter.
To Franklin, Kentucky, and Dale.
Dale, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Yeah, thanks.
Um Mark, w why don't these companies just network together and refuse to take the money?
Well, the banks.
Yeah, I mean, what what is well, I know it's not a likely scenario, but I'm just saying if it's That's the problem.
They are all networked together, and that's why they're all in trouble.
You know, when you see what's happened with regard to the financial meltdown and how this started with subprime loans and ended up dragging in almost every bank in the United States of America, what it's like is the Christmas tree.
One bulb goes out and all the lights go out.
I the answer is they need the money.
I mean, Bank of America is Bank of America.
This is a giant company that bought a lot of banks.
Its stock is below ten.
Citigroup's stock is below five.
Some of them have already gone under.
Whether or not we should have done the bailout or not, whether or not TARP should have been created or not, you can argue to death.
I don't like bailouts, but I can see why saving the American financial private structure was important.
My point is that I'm just fearful that we're going to use the government's putting money in as a way to allow government now to extend its reach to start telling all these businesses how to run their operations.
What business is it of the United States of America government how much money a bank pays its employees?
And their response is, well, we're giving them money, so we have the right to tell them that.
That's the fear that we have here.
They're going to use this money as an opportunity to inject themselves into the private system and start telling businesses what they can and cannot do, and nothing good is going to come out of that.
Well, I guess I guess the larger point or or that I'm making here, and maybe to extend it a little bit would be that it would put the spotlight back on the government and the onus on them and turn the public's attention back toward the government as the bad guys instead of uh looking at the companies.
Well, you're suggesting that we'll go back the other way.
The problem with that is once you start becoming socialist, it's real hard ever to turn back because government is just so involved in the operation of everything, and that term is one that we can't run away from anymore.
Socialism is what this is.
When you're talking about government taking over health care, you're now talking about government essentially running banking.
You've got government running industries and telling the people who are in those industries what they can and can't do.
Let's think this through for a minute.
Five hundred thousand, which is the number that Obama comes up with.
Five hundred thousand dollars is the limit on executive pay for institutions that receive any bailout money.
Why five hundred?
Why not four fifty?
Why not four hundred?
Why not three hundred?
Well, three hundred, that's ridiculous.
Why are you even bringing that up?
Well, what's so magical about five hundred?
Now let's imagine you're one of these financial institutions, and you're trying to turn yourselves around, and you're looking for a CEO, and a lot of them are going to be looking for CEOs soon because a lot of these institutions are firing their CEOs, and for good reason.
Okay, we'd like to hire you, but we can only pay you $500,000.
Well, I'll go to work for such and such a company.
They aren't under any limits.
So we're telling the banks that they're only going to be able to hire CEOs or other corporate officers at below market rates, unless the government puts limits on everybody's pay.
Now you know that's what liberals would love to do.
This is nothing more than using the bailout as an excuse to act out the politics of envy.
We don't like the fact that those fat cats make all that money, so we'll use the bailout as our pretense for doing what we've always wanted to do, which is to stop people from getting paid a lot of money.
Now you tell me how far we can take this.
Notice he starts with banks that are getting bailout money.
What about his friends in the movie business?
The entertainers, are we going to put limits on their pay?
Well, no, of course, we're not going to do that.
We're not bailing them out.
How about limits on the amount of pay the ex-administration officials can get in working in the private sector?
The other part that just bothers me about this is every time Obama presents anything along these lines, he does it with this sense of high-mindedness.
Here's a quote.
This is America.
We don't disparage wealth.
We don't begrudge anybody for achieving success.
And we believe that success should be rewarded.
But what gets people upset, and rightfully so, are executives being rewarded for failure, especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.
In other words, he's the guy that's going to bring some reality into this.
He's the guy that's coming to the rescue with some common sense.
He says this after nominating three tax cheats to his cabinet.
Just spell it out and be honest about it.
You want to use this bailout to appeal to the populist instincts of Americans who think that it's wrong that some people should get paid a lot of money.
Once this store is open, it's never going to be closed.
You know, you go into a bank, you buy a CD.
A lot of them, if you take out a CD more than $10,000, they give you a higher interest rate.
Well, you can't do that.
That's not fair to the people who don't have $10,000 to put into a CD.
Let's have the government put restrictions on that.
There's no end to this.
Let's go to Spencer, Iowa, and K.K. You're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Um, my comment and question, I guess the comment is that I know a lot of people that are nearing retirement age and they've watched their their investments and their savings just go right down the tube.
And my question for you is, and somebody smarter than me is why aren't these people, you know, if if these people are doing something criminal, why aren't they being charged with a crime instead of giving them TARP money?
Well, I don't know.
What did they do that was criminal?
Well, you know, I guess that's all that's the way the other side plays this whole issue is that these um Wall Street CEOs are nothing but a bunch of crooks, and you know, I guess one of the places they might want to start is Fannie Mae and Freddie Back.
What they did was they got involved in a racket.
You want to find out where this all started.
It all started with Barney Frank.
Barney Frank and his buddies, including Barack Obama, told Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to do everything in their power to have mortgages get into the hands of people who weren't able to get them.
It wasn't fair that they were being denied this opportunity to access the American dream.
So Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which have their hands on about half the subprime mortgages in one way or another in this country, started encouraging the making of these mortgages.
Because the subprime mortgages paid higher than market interest rates, they were good investments for the banks that were getting the money.
They were making all this money because since the housing market was booming, everybody was making good on their loan payments, which are generally one to one and a half to two points over a regular mortgage.
Wall Street sees this.
This is great.
We want in on this too.
So they buy up some of this paper, then they create these derivatives, and they tell everybody, don't worry, there's no risk because we've got these derivatives are tied to one and a half or two million mortgages.
They're not all going to go bad.
So everybody drank the Kool-Aid.
What they were was stupid.
What they did was they took way too much risk.
But they were all doing it.
In hindsight, clearly what they did was ridiculously stupid.
As a result of all of this, because we can't have all banks fail, we're on the hook for them anyway, since we ensure deposits through the FDIC.
We create this bailout, and that's just becoming the entree now to run around and start telling all these currently banks, but it's going to be everybody else what you can and can't do.
The FCC oversees broadcasting.
Radio.
The next step they can take is starting to tell radio stations how much they can pay their tally.
And if you don't think liberals would love to jump on the bandwagon of, since radio stations are using the public airwaves, they shouldn't be able to pay individuals who promote hate and intolerance all of this money.
Let's put limits on compensation of radio talk show hosts.
There's no telling how far they will go with this once they are given the power to decide who can and can't be paid what kind of money.
Thank you for the call, Kay.
Let's go to Valparaiso, which is in Indiana.
Do you know that that was in Indiana?
I know that it's in Indiana.
Valparez also has a basketball team.
Homer Drew's the coach of that team.
Arnold, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hello, Mark.
I sure got like listening to your program.
Uh this business about how everybody is lining up for this uh stimulus package and you know, all this free stuff given out by the government as applied to private uh businesses.
Uh is Obama going to apply the same rules and regulations to the governments who are also beginning to line up, the governors and the mayors.
Well, they actually do.
And that's part of the problem with federal funds.
The federal government is always regulating what you can't do with those funds.
There are always strings attached to federal money.
And that's why I'm very, very wary of extending this bailout beyond the banks.
Already with regard to the car companies, you see all there's a lot of criticism that the bailout of the car companies didn't include more requirements to build more fuel efficient cars and to do this, that, and the other thing.
Once the government starts giving you money, the government starts telling you how you can and can't spend the money, and I don't think that that's a good thing.
Now I'm not a purist on this.
I understand that if you're going out there with your handout for corporate welfare, that the public has a right to comment on what you can and can't do.
Local communities create a TIFT district, tax increment financing for a business to do some expansion or s whatever.
We have every right to tell them we don't like the expansion or not, because we're giving them that money.
This is going beyond that, though.
And that's why I don't Don't like how this bailout's being structured, and I don't like how Obama is taking advantage of the fact that there is a bailout to inject the government totally into the private sector.
Take a look at this decision with regard to Citigroup and its sponsorship of the New New York Mets baseball stadium.
They made that deal a year and a half or two years ago, I think.
They made a deal.
They signed a contract to put their naming rights on that stadium, and they're now under pressure to back out of that.
They're being they're under pressure to renege on a deal that they made.
Now, I know most Democrats don't believe that there's anything wrong with telling a lie, but they made a commitment to do this.
So we're going to tell them not to do it.
Furthermore, they made a commitment to do it because they think it's in their interest to have that name City splashed all over that stadium, and every time a baseball game is televised from that station from City for City Park or whatever it's called, that that name is out there.
We're going to criticize the use of bailout money for that.
We can go on and on and on and on in micromanaging companies.
We use our anger over the fact that these companies are mismanaged to create a policy that seems reasonable, limit how much money we can pay their employees.
Once that has been established, we're essentially saying businesses don't get to run themselves.
Government runs the business.
You take bailout funds, which are being offered under the pretense of the banks surviving and the banks continuing to be able to operate, and we use that as an excuse to just run the banks, which is what liberals always want to do with the private sector.
They can't make it in the private sector on their own, so they want to micromanage it from outside under the pretense of government.
That's what socialism is, and it will not work.
As badly managed as these institutions were, they would be even worse if Barney Frank literally were the CEO.
No bank's going to be able to survive.
No bank's going to be able to make a profit if it's going to have to bow and scrape before Democrats in this administration in the Congress on every financial decision that they want to make, including their decisions with regard to their marketing, their pay, and everything else.
It's a very tough position to take because ninety-eight percent of Americans think that these Wall Street guys were overpaid and that they shouldn't be getting massive salaries when they're showing record losses and they're receiving bailout money.
I'm not denying that.
I'm merely saying that the person who's telling them they shouldn't be making this should not be the government of the United States, it should be the shareholders, it should be the board of directors, it should be the people who are really suffering because of these bad decisions.
And nobody has suffered more here than the people who own stock in these.
Look at your local bank.
Check what its stock price is right now.
Were your executives overpaid there?
Yeah, well, maybe they were.
And maybe they ought to be fired.
But that call ought to be made by the investors who own the bank and by the boards of directors that are there and not the president of the United States and not by public policy.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, suggesting that we're headed for socialism, which sounds like the kind of thing that right wing kooks used to say.
What if we actually are?
And I know we've been headed in that direction for a time, but this business of executive pay limits and the idea that if you receive government money, the government's now gonna tell you how to run your businesses.
We're gonna look back at this ten years from now and wonder how we became an entirely socialistic economy.
We're gonna say that was the key.
That was the turning point.
Why do you think the left which used to scream and yell and howl about corporate welfare?
Why do you think they support the bailout?
They support the bailout because they realize this is how they get their foot in the door.
They get to boss around their evil empire.
Corporate America.
They support the bailout because they know that this gives them control.
In other words, the people who have done nothing to be in the private sector themselves are now supporting bailouts for companies because it becomes their way to be able to essentially run those companies.
And no good's ever going to come from that.
This is Berkeley, California and Madison, Wisconsin, now running corporate America.
Starts with executive compensation and you know where else it's gonna go.
Just see where it's going to go.
They're already talking about the private jets.
And I admit I don't think there's much reason for any company to own a private jet.
But do you want that call to be made by government?
Well, I shouldn't have those private jets.
Well, if the they shouldn't have the private jet, it's going to affect their bottom line and they're going to suffer, which is the way we're supposed to have a check on that kind of excessive spending.
Fullerton, California and Mike, Mike, it's your turn on Rush Limbaugh's program with Mark Belling.
Hey, yeah, you mentioned in your opening segment that the way that you punish a corporation overpaying its executives is that the shareholders get punished.
And I agree.
That's exactly the way it's supposed to work.
But here, I'm being forced to be a shareholder in a corporation.
I'm being forced to support AIG and Wells Fargo and all the rest of these corporations.
And I don't have any choice in that matter.
My representatives are making that decision for me.
So I sure want them overseeing the way that money is spent.
If you don't want to be told what to do by the government, then don't apply for federal money.
Run your corporation the way that it's supposed to be and be answerable to your shareholders.
I agree with you.
Now you thought I was going to disagree with that, didn't you?
Well, you did disagree with that.
No, I don't.
You missed one of my key points.
The reason to be bothered by the bailout is that it creates this notion that the government gets to tell you what to do if you're going to be bailed out.
I know, you're forced to be involved in this because we've made the decision, rightly or wrongly, that the way to stop the American financial system from literally collapsing because it's all a house of cards, is we've got to inject money into these companies, which I'm not defending one way or another.
Maybe we had to do it, maybe we don't.
What I'm bothered by is the idea that we're going to use that as an excuse to tell these businesses what to do.
So you're saying because you're forced to be involved in this, you want to have a bunch of liberals who are now your elected officials, tell them what to do.
Do you think that's going to help those banks recover, or do you think that that means that they're going to be financially sick forever?
Well, the first thing is they're not going to run it any worse than the idiots who've been running it already.
But but I don't want a bunch of liberals telling them what to do.
I want my representatives telling them what to do.
And who do you think if you want Republicans to tell them what's going on?
Who do you think your representatives are?
Well, right now I mean I'm not sure.
Who's running this country?
Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's running this country.
She's the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Barack Obama's the president of the United States.
Now the point that you make is once they're taking this money, you want them to be able to oversee this because they can't do any worse.
So in other words, we take the fact that there was a total meltdown, starting with subprime loans, and erase any other success that the American corporate engine has ever created.
Corporate America is the reason we have the standard of living that we've had.
While we are in a recession, we can't use that as an excuse to entirely throw out the entire notion of private management of private businesses and put them all underneath the thumb of the government.
By that standard, then, any time any business is in bad shape, we're going to have the government come in and run it.
There's nothing but nothing but trouble that's going to come from that.
Look at the economies of Western Europe and how their c their economies have gone completely in the you know what as a result of total state control.
You're going to have the government coming in now and telling them everything that they can or cannot do, and you're you're confident that they're going to be doing it better than what's currently being done.
Whether that's right or wrong, it's going to lead to a very different kind of country than we are used to having.
We should do is use it as a chance to reinforce that wall, to keep government out of corporations.
That's my that's my point.
That's my point.
I don't like these bailouts because they become the excuse for allowing government to run things.
On that point, you and I agree.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I've got a good line here.
In our attempt to punish the past, we're going to screw up the future.
John Thane, the guy that was running Merrill Lynch, shoved all of the executive bonuses into the OA calendar years so that they wouldn't be subject to approval by Bank of America.
Flew all the executives out on the big trip.
Those decisions were indefensible.
I'm not defending any of them.
What those big brokerages and big investment banks did is screw up so badly that they've got to go get put their hands out to the government for money.
I'm not defending that.
I merely don't want us to screw up the future of the private sector system in this country by going after punishing people for decisions that were made in the past because then we'll never recover.
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