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March 25, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:28
March 25, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #3
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And we're back.
Rush Limbaugh, the fastest three hours in media.
Here we are already at our third hour in today's excursion into broadcast excellence.
Thanks for being with us today.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address.
El Rushbaugh at EIBnet.com.
We want to go back to Eva in Greenwich, New Jersey, whose husband works for AIG.
Eva, are you still there?
Yes, I'm here.
All right.
What you're getting calls about today is a piece in the New York Times, a resignation letter sent to the CEO, Ed Liddy, by an employee named Jake DeSantis.
And that's what she told us earlier that friends of hers were calling and quoting elements or parts of this letter that's printed today as an op-ed in the New York Times.
It's entitled, Dear AIG, I Quit.
He was working for a dollar, like the CEO.
His payment, and he's in the financial products division, which is the one that's been portrayed here as evil to the core.
And he was working for a dollar in lieu of the bonuses that were due on March the 13th.
Now, if he even gets his bonus, whatever net he gets, he's giving it to charity.
He's getting out of there.
He wants nothing to do with it anymore.
He's fed up.
Now, your husband works for AIG.
You had one more point to me you wanted to make, but you needed more than 10 seconds to do it.
Yes, my husband works for AIG, and he's also a recipient on one of the bonuses.
It's a small bonus, but it's also this deferred compensation bonus.
It's not based on performance.
It was promised to him a year ago.
It was a part of his salary that was withheld.
It's not about the money that I'm so outraged about.
Money is very little.
What I'm outraged about is about the media and even more about the attitude of the public, about the stonewalling of AIG employees, about the fact that AIG had to have barricades in front of the building, about the buses that are being sent, the Connecticut executives, about the threats that are being sent to our children.
My husband took it so much to his heart, exactly to his heart, that last week he ended up being admitted with very severe chest pain to the hospital where he was worked up for heart attack.
He's still being worked out.
He was discharged two days ago.
They are very concerned about him.
He's supposed to be on very strict backdress.
However, my husband, as a loyal AIG employee, went to work yesterday and went to work today.
Tomorrow he's getting stressed, another test done.
And my point I'm trying to make is I am, as you can pick up my accent, I come, I grew up, I spent, you know, I've been here for 20 years, but I grew up in a socialist country and where I learned to question and be inquisitive about media.
And I'm shocked here at American public, about the fact that they never question the media and they never question the lack of ethical backbone that mainstream media does not have.
I mean, they don't have any ethical backbone.
The facts that they present are extremely selective, not to mention the opinions.
And you know, I feel really that my family became an innocent victim of this situation.
And what really, what I realized that it's not only about my husband, it's not only about me.
Yesterday I wanted my children to watch the president speak.
I want to discuss it with them.
My oldest daughter is 12.
And my husband said to me, staying sick and bad, well, maybe they shouldn't listen to it because he's going to smear at IG.
I would like them to be proud of me.
And that really broke the camel's heart.
It was a straw that broke the camel's legs, whatever you say.
How are your kids?
Who I'm calling?
They are 12, 10, 8, and 6.
12, 10, 8, and 6.
And I assume the 12 and 10-year-olds are who you're talking about when you say they broke their hearts when they saw the president rip down his company.
Absolutely.
Here's what I would say to you.
The media is who they are.
Those of us native-born Americans have been marveling at the ongoing dwindling professionalism, the ongoing increased activism, the abrogation of any sense of responsibility in terms of their reporting.
It is what it is.
I wish, and I think that you need to redirect your anger and your family's anger to President Obama and his administration.
And I'm serious, Eva, because it is his administration and the Democrat Party, his colleagues in the Democrat Party in the House of Representatives, who ran a sham, a fraudulent show last week.
They knew all about these bonuses.
The stimulus legislation required these bonuses to be paid with no limits on them.
These members voted for it, and they conducted a program, a show last week, acting as though they had no clue and that they were screwed and that they got the shaft and they wanted to find out who's responsible for when it's them.
I think your anger should be more properly channeled at the President of the United States.
The President of the United States could have shut down these protests.
The President of the United States could have stood up and said, wait, we don't need to have this kind of behavior toward these AIG people.
He wants it.
The President of the United States wants you feeling threatened.
He wants the American people hating you and your company and your husband's company.
He wants the chaos.
He wants the people of this country to think that the private sector is all AIG, that there's no difference in any private sector company, large or small, from AIG.
You're all corrupt.
You're all cheaters.
You're all thieves.
And he's going to fix it.
And he's going to fix it by taking over these companies.
And he's going to make fairness the order of the day.
And he's going to take all of this money that your husband and all the other people that work there make, and he's going to give it to the rightful owners of the country, the poor and the middle class, who companies like your husbands have screwed and shafted.
That's his motivation.
That's his objective.
That's the Obama plan.
So your anger should be more properly directed at him, just as you saw last night and just as your kids saw last night.
It is not presidential for the President of the United States to stand up and to denounce a single company like this for the express purpose of creating mob behavior and a mob mentality.
And this is his life.
What do you think a community organizer does?
A community organizer for A Corner or anybody else goes to the downtrodden in any community and says, you are here and you are where you are because they have given you the shaft.
They have taken what is rightfully yours.
They are the people we need to protest and punish to get back what is rightfully yours.
He's just taking it now beyond the stages of Chicago to the stages of America.
That's who Barack Obama is.
And he is just, he's behaving as any community organizer does who is an acolyte of Saul Olinski, whose objective is chaos and the destruction of American capitalism or capitalism anywhere.
So you can sit there and act outraged at the media, but the media are just slaves to Obama, and they're going to follow his lead.
And so your anger here needs to be taken to the top.
Eva, I'm glad you called.
Thanks very much.
I appreciate it, and I really feel bad for you.
We've got, well, let me, let's see.
Amy in New York City is in the same vein on what?
All right.
Okay, Amy in New York, so let's go to her because she wants to talk about the bonus as well.
Amy, I'm glad you called.
You're up next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
And I have to say Amy is one of my all-time top 10 favorite female names.
Oh, wow.
I feel very honored.
Thank you.
Yes.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
And I apologize.
I missed the first part of the discussion with Mark, and I was so happy to get the last copy of his book in Union Square yesterday, which is exciting.
But yes, I did call about the bonuses, and I wanted to further Eva's point.
And I feel her pain.
I used to work on Wall Street before becoming a stay-at-home mom.
My husband still works on Wall Street and has for the past 22 years.
And I just wanted to share some insight with you, if I may, and your listeners.
And number one is that the current buzz right now on Wall Street is that the quality people that are there, like Eva's husband and my husband, are now thinking about leaving these U.S. firms, maybe not Eva's in particular, but my husband knows a lot of people that he manages that want to leave because these foreign companies are coming in, like Numera Securities is one, and they're marketing themselves to U.S. employees by saying, we didn't get any TARP money,
so your bonuses won't be affected.
Come over with us.
That's one of the big things.
And they're poaching all of these really top-quality candidates to do that.
And the second thing that I wanted to mention is with regard to the bonuses is that what I don't understand, and obviously the media is very biased, as we all know, but nobody is talking about what the cost of living is in the tri-state area, meaning New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, versus other areas of the country.
And I'm sure Eva's feeling the same way living in New Jersey.
I mean, you know, Wall Street, it's not everybody's fault that Wall Street and the insurance world happens to be in New York City.
You know, it's not as easy to live in other areas of the country living or working for those kind of firms.
You know, but for example, and I'm sure Eva feels the same way, but we've made the decision to live up here because if we didn't, my husband would never see my kids for dinner, and we wouldn't be able to educate our kids, you know, here in New York City.
So we feel penalized because we might not be able to afford private education if these bonuses end up being taxed or having to give back and have to give back to the government in some way.
And it's very disheartening, quite honestly.
I know a lot of people in the city that voted for Obama.
Obviously, New York, we were, of course, not one of them.
My husband is from Dublin, Ireland originally, and he's not currently a U.S. citizen, but he has a green card.
You know, but the point is, is that I think.
He worked at AIG, not for long.
No, no, no.
My husband doesn't work at AIG.
He works at Morton Stanley.
But the point is that a lot of these folks that are working at these firms are saying to themselves, well, gosh, as much as I want to stay and I want to be loyal, why am I going to do that when I've got to give my money back?
And, you know, I don't, for example, I was looking on the cost of living in New York versus some other areas of the country.
And just to kind of get my head wrapped around it, because nobody's really talking about that.
So I went onto this site.
It's called salary.com.
And I looked up like what it would cost to earn $500,000 in like Chicago, Illinois, where our friend is from, right?
In order to obtain a current standard of living in New York City, you would have to make approximately 44% more to live in New York City.
So in other words, you would have to make over $725,000 to make it in New York versus Chicago, Illinois.
Now, wait a minute.
I have to stop you here.
I want to try to help.
Okay.
Can you hold on through a commercial break?
Of course.
Okay.
This is Amy in New York City, and we'll be back in just a second.
We are back, and we're with Amy in New York City, whose husband is an employee on Wall Street, not at AIG, is being recruited like a lot of other people are for foreign-owned entities because it just doesn't make sense to work for the American entities because the Obama administration is out to destroy them.
But Amy, I have to tell you something here.
You, as you described your financial circumstances to me and thus over 20 million Americans tuning in, you are one of the 40,000 families in New York City who are making the city work.
Mayor Bloomberg said the other day in opposing a new tax on the wealthy in New York, state tax that the governor wanted to impose, that he was afraid these new taxes would cause people to leave the city.
You got a city of 8 million people, but 40,000 of them pay over half of the income taxes that generate the revenue for the city to function with its welfare state.
As a result, Amy, now please listen to me.
You are not allowed to complain about it.
I know.
I'm just going to be honest with you.
Your circumstance, I totally understand them.
I lived there, but you did not generate much sympathy for your circumstance when you said $500,000 in Chicago, you need $750,000 in New York.
We live in the city.
We have to send our kids to private schools.
But people out there hear you say that.
Why?
What do you mean, have to?
They've not lived in the city and they don't know what PS44 looks like.
Exactly.
Or PS 195.
They don't know that you would work as hard as you have to not to have to send your kids to a public school in the city where the dropout rate's over 50%.
Here's, let me try to explain what she was saying.
Hang on here, Amy.
We went to that website during the break, the salary.com website.
The salary.com website tells you wherever you're living now, what you're making, how much you would need additional if you lived in New York City, or how much less you would need to stay even if you moved to a smaller city.
So right now, this is an example.
If you make $250,000 a year gross in Milwaukee, to have the same lifestyle in New York City, you would have to earn $450,000.
Now, you cited the example of $500,000 Chicago, and you need over $700,000 in New York City to replicate a lifestyle of $500,000 in Chicago.
I need to point out to people that $500,000 a year is not enough for your average Chicago black family to get by on.
The Obamas couldn't do it.
When the Obamas lived in Chicago, when Barack got elected to the state Senate, I mean, that's chump change money he gets paid.
That's why he needed help from Tony Redzco to buy his house.
It is why he needed to get hold of a hospital to create a job that paid over $330,000 a year for his wife, Michelle.
And since she's left that job, they've not replaced it.
It was a job created with money that was guaranteed to the Obama family in the form of a salary for Michelle Obama simply because her husband was in the Illinois State Senate.
That's why they had to write the two books that earned them $2.5 million, because not even your average black family can get by on half a million a year in Chicago.
So I understand where you're coming from, but you are not going to evoke sympathy from people who will never, never earn $500,000 a year, much less $750,000 a year.
People, it's because you earn that much that your family does, that they are susceptible to being whipped into a mob frenzy by the President of the United States when you get bonus money or when, and Wall Street right now is the whipping boy.
Wall Street is the seat of capitalism.
It's under assault by the Obama administration.
And the people up there, they took the bailout money.
And once you take money from people like Barney Frank, the Democrats in Congress, and now Obama, all bets are off.
You have to understand that you no longer have your freedom.
I know your husband's not at AIG, but I'll bet your husband works at a company that took a bailout of some kind or is a subsidiary of a company that did.
Yes.
So I totally understand the challenges that you think you want to live the best life you can.
You look at living in the city of New York as a sacrifice.
That's where your husband's job is.
You don't want to live a three-hour commute away so your husband can only come home on weekends.
You want your husband to be able to come home at night after his 14-hour days and see the kids.
Yes.
That to you is a sacrifice and what it's costing you and so forth.
But see, in these class envy times, your story only serves to throw more gasoline on the class envy fire.
People want families like yours to suffer.
They want you to understand how hard life is for them.
And that's why they support Obama, because they think that Obama's going to get your mind right.
Obama is going to take away from you all these things.
And you're going to have to find out what it's like to send your kid to a rotten school.
And you're going to have to find out what it's like to have your husband never be home.
And you're going to have to find out what it's like for the rest of them.
And that's what Obama's going to do.
He's going to equalize things.
He's going to level the playing field.
You should be hurting.
You should be in pain.
So you know what it's like for every other American.
That's the prevailing attitude today.
Whereas you think you and your family are doing great things for the country, great things for the company, the best thing you can for your kids.
And you are now said to be totally out of touch.
You just can't complain about your financial circumstances at your income level.
But ultimately, what's going to happen is that, you know, because Wall Street is shrinking, the insurance sector is shrinking, people will go to foreign entities to make money.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly what Obama wants.
He's trying to destroy all of this.
And he's got people voting for him and supporting him on that basis.
A man, a legend, a way of life.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB notary.
Hey, right here along the lines of what we were just discussing, there's a guy over in Scotland named Sir Fred Goodwin.
He is the disgraced former CEO of RBS, the Royal Bank of Scotland.
And Sir Freddie has a massive villa in Edinburgh, which has just been vandalized, along with that of his car, a Mercedes S600.
Frankly, I don't know why you wouldn't just go get an S65 if you're going to get an S600, but to each his own.
Here's the headline from the UK Daily Mail.
Anti-capitalists admit attacking Fred the Shred's home and warn other bankers this is just the beginning.
Sir Fred Goodwin is known as Fred the Shred because of the banking crisis in the UK.
Anti-capitalists today claimed responsibility for vandalizing a home of disgraced former RBS boss Sir Fred Goodwin.
Several windows in his luxury villa in Edinburgh were smashed and a Mercedes S600 in the driveway damaged early this morning.
Sir Fred, who's at the center of a huge row over his 16 million pound pension, was said to be shaken by the vandalism, was not thought to be at the house at the time.
A group calling themselves bank bosses are criminals later claimed responsibility and ominously warned the attack was only the start of a campaign against executives.
We are angry that rich people like Sir Fred the Shred are paying themselves a huge amount of money, living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute, and homeless.
The protester said in an email sent to media organizations, this is a crime.
Bank bosses should be jailed.
This is just the beginning.
Anti-capitalists.
And you have to think that this kind of thing will not be contained to borders across the ocean.
I don't know if they're a subsidiary of Acorn.
Let me read further.
What's the name of the stupid group here again?
Bank bosses are criminals.
It's a long story.
I haven't got time to go through it here and find out if they are an offshoot of Acorn.
Nothing would surprise me if not Acorn, an Acorn-like group.
Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Ladies and gentlemen, so it's this fever is being worked up into a frenzy out there.
And in this country, it's being aided and abetted and promoted by the Obama administration and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Nancy in Reno, Nevada, you're next.
Great to have you here on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
Hi.
Hello.
It's a pleasure to speak to you.
Thank you.
I was driving down the road here in Reno, Nevada, and I just heard on our local radio show that Harry Reid is sending an email out stating that Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Party, or they may have even said the head of the Republican Party, is targeting Harry Reid for the 2010 election so that he'll lose.
Thank you, Senator.
Senator Reed knows how good a fundraiser I am.
When he sent that letter asking my partners to shut me up, his letter raised $4.2 million on eBay.
Senator Reed is well aware that the lunatic fringe that votes for him in Nevada hate my guts, and they'll send money to defeat me.
So it's a fundraising technique on the part of Senator Reed, Dingy Harry.
Yeah, he's doing it in an email form.
So I don't know if you have any way of looking that up or having your folks look it up.
But if you don't, I'd be more than happy to mail it to you.
We can find it.
Our tentacles into the Democrat Party various apparatuses are deep and wide.
Republicans and Rush Limbaugh.
Well, he is right.
But I would love to see Dingy Harry defeated.
I'd love to have Dingy Harry get Tom Dasheled.
I really would.
All these guys, they come from moderately conservative states.
They go to Washington to become leader of the Democrat Party, and they end up doing everything that's anathema to the people that vote for them.
They're not representing their voters when they assume leadership of this kooky party.
So I would love for him to get dashed.
Dashel saying happened to him in South Dakota.
Anyway, Nancy, thanks for the heads up.
I appreciate it.
You know, one of the things that always amazes me when we talk about the government getting bigger is the evidence.
People in their everyday lives, whenever they encounter a government bureaucracy, they hate it.
They hate going to DMV.
They hate having to deal with bureaucrats in the forms, whether it's a permit from town to build a house, whatever the bureaucracy is, people hate it.
And yet, despite this actual real world experience, the same people somehow, either instinctively or as a result of persuasion, can be influenced to vote for government running more and more of their lives.
And one of the things that people apparently want more and more government involved in is healthcare.
And our buddies at the Heritage Foundation, working together with the National Center for Policy Analysis and the Hoover Institution, have identified 10 things you probably didn't know about health care.
Here are the 10.
And I'm not going to read everything.
Just read the 10 things.
There are paragraphs associated with the 10 things to prove them and back them up.
Number 10, or fact number one, Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.
Number two, Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.
Europeans and Canadians have government-run health care.
Fact number three, Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.
Fact number four, Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians do.
Fact number five, lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians.
Fact number six, Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the UK.
Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long, sometimes more than a year, to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer.
Fact number seven, people in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed.
Fact number eight, Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians.
Fact number nine, Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the UK.
Read MRI there.
And fact number 10, Americans are responsible for the vast majority of health care innovations.
There's just 10 reasons right there.
No reason to turn this over to a bunch of bureaucrats.
And Obama spoke about this last night.
It's simply insane to suggest that if you look at his budget, he talks about we can reduce the deficit and we can get the economy going by reducing health care costs.
And yet if you look at his budget, health care costs spiral out of control.
There are no cuts in anything.
There's no evidence anywhere that nationalized health care works and is an improvement over private sector health care.
This is just one of the many, countless things you can learn at askheritage.org.
They do this kind of stuff all the time.
They make it available on their website.
You just have to enter the question, askheritage.org.
It's an amazing resource.
They are true blue principled conservatives.
They're scholars there, brilliant people who are, in most cases, there are exceptions, and in most cases, they are able to write this stuff in a way that anybody can understand it, which is crucial with some of the information that they're dealing with.
Askheritage.org, our buddies.
They're great people there.
And this top 10 facts about American healthcare, there's a plethora of this type of information.
I got to take a quick timeout.
But be patient, my friends, because we will be back with more broadcast excellence long before you know it.
Holy smokes, folks, the stock market's plunging out there.
It was up 160, 170 points earlier today.
Now it's down 82 and falling.
Well, it was down 93.
Now it's minus 84.
Watch it.
And there is a reason why.
The market was up today on some unexpected good news in what?
Housing starts or something.
What was it?
Factory orders or what?
Yeah.
And again, the drive-bys wrote the story as, whoa, whoa, that's a really unexpected one.
Look at factory orders.
You know, and it's frustrating that it's always unexpected, but thank God they didn't credit Obama with it.
You know, that's next.
Pretty soon all this news comes out that the economy is recovering.
If it is, it's going to be, credit's going to be given to Obama.
But so we're up 165 on that news, and now it's down 92.
So that's 250 points.
It has fallen in an hour.
And do you want to know why?
Good, because I will tell you.
Today they had a treasury auction.
They auctioned some tea bills today.
The auction went very poorly.
There are lots of concerns relating to the explosion in American debt.
And a lot of people say, look, I'm not buying into it.
Now, in England today, they didn't get enough bids to sell any bonds.
And this has happened twice in the past few months in Germany.
So when governments float bonds, I mean, that's how they finance deficits and so forth.
And when they start auctioning them off and there aren't any takers, or in our case, very few, that's not a good sign.
And the market is reflecting that.
Also, more America bashing from the Clinton, I'm sorry, Obama administration.
As you know, Mrs. Clinton, is she in Mexico or is she on the way?
Whatever.
Mrs. Clinton today, her Reuters story, U.S. to blame for much of Mexico violence.
I feel very strong, she said, that we have a co-responsibility.
And part of what we're trying to do is not only acknowledge that, but work with the Mexicans to create a very best possible response.
The Secretary of State is paving the way for a flurry of high-level visits involving Eric Holder and the Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano.
The Reuters story says U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that an insatiable appetite in the U.S. for illegal drugs was to blame for much of the violence plaguing Mexico.
So here we have Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton, once again bashing the United States of America.
Also, you know, if I'm the teleprompter in the White House, I got to be roaring, rip-roaring mad.
I have to be fit to be tied.
Because without the teleprompter, this administration doesn't have anything.
Without this teleprompter, Obama wanders aimlessly through the vocabulary.
Through the dictionary, looking for a cogent thought, uttering uh every nine seconds, it seems.
And so the drive-bys are out saying, hey, looky, looky, looky.
Obama didn't use a teleprompter last night.
Obama didn't use a teleprompter last night.
He most certainly did use the teleprompter.
The teleprompter was larger than ever last night.
The teleprompter's words were on a giant 52-inch LCD screen right in front of Obama.
They had those little wing mirrors that you see normally taken down.
And I'm telling you folks, this is a response to me, old L. Rushbow, because I made the point, I started laughing about this.
If you're going to use a teleprompter for opening statements at a press conference for crying out loud, can't you come up with 10 minutes of an opening statement in your head and go out there and do it and take questions?
And the problem with a teleprompter at a press conference is you're looking left and you're looking right.
You're never looking in the camera where the American people are watching you.
It's not like making a speech to a big throng.
When you're doing a televised press conference, you look right in the camera.
So that's what they did, responding to me, no doubt.
This is not pomposity.
This is confidence.
Had this giant screen, and that's where the teleprompter's words were for Obama to speak.
What surprised me, you know, they have pool cameras in there.
What surprised me that the pool camera took a wide shot and showed this to everybody.
Now, I, as a highly trained broadcast specialist, and I mean this, I knew Obama was on prompter from get-go because he's not that good at it.
Everybody thinks he's brilliant on the prompter.
No offense, prompter.
I don't want to anger the teleprompter here.
Teleprompter's job's tough enough.
Teleprompter is the teleprompter of the United States for crying out loud.
But when that teleprompter, I've used them, and when they're right below the camera lens, you don't look left or right.
You look theoretically right down the camera eye, the lens of the camera.
And you can tell when somebody's reading the words.
You can tell by looking at their eyes.
If you T-bowed this thing last night, take a look, the opening statement.
You can see the eyes get locked straight ahead, even when the head moves left and right.
You can see it.
Even just the tiniest movements left and right.
The eyes never move or very seldom move.
And if the speed of the prompter is jerky and hurky, you can see the interruption in the rhythm.
And I have to tell you, this teleprompter, I love this teleprompter.
This teleprompter will not be denied.
And this teleprompter puts Obama through his paces.
And the teleprompter won last night.
Teleprompter won.
Obama couldn't keep up with the prompter, even on that giant screen right there, very thin-skinned up there.
Teleprompter, though, has been dissed.
Everybody's saying he wasn't there.
He most certainly was, front and center.
Okay, one correction.
It was not Treasury bills today that were auctioned.
It was five-year notes.
And it went very badly.
The auction of five-year notes today went very badly at the Treasury Department.
Also, Obama had lunch today with the Senate Democrats on the day that the Senate and House begin formal consideration of budget resolutions that don't fully reflect a lot of his priorities.
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