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Feb. 23, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:21
February 23, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Hi, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh Auto Roll.
Great to have you with us, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
And as always, we look forward to talking to you.
Telephone number 800-282-2882.
Email address, lrushbaugh at EIBNet.com.
So here are the numbers and some commentary.
$701 million in federal stimulus money.
Again, now the source for this, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
$701 million of the Obama surplus bill, the Porculus bill.
$701 million went to Wisconsin.
$632 million of it was spent shoring up health care and pension and wages for public sector employees, 8,000 of them.
Now, the regime was telling us that the stimulus would create 3 to 4 million new jobs in the private sector, that all the job creation was in the private sector.
They just plain lied.
And lest we forget, on top of the $787 billion stimulus, Obama came around again with a $26 billion stimulus specified to the teachers.
Remember, during the height of the stimulus, the recession kept happening.
Remember, the Democrats kept wringing their hands about, oh, we might have to lay off teachers.
And of course, no parent wants the teachers laid off.
Oh, it's our kids.
They're doing it for the kids.
So Obama came up with $26 billion additional dollars targeted for the teachers just last summer.
And as we noted at the time, that all went to paying for their union pensions and retirement benefits.
None of it went to rehiring laid-off teachers as we were told it would.
We were told it was in L.A.
We cited what happened in L.A. and California.
They did not use the money to hire new teachers.
They shored up existing teachers and their pensions.
Now, Obama's recently submitted budget also includes untold billions that are slated for the public sector unions in the name of improving education and repairing our infrastructure.
Now, what this exposes folks a great deal more than what has already been said or written, this is and has always been an effort to beat down the middle class, Saul Alinsky style.
Now, as much as the left wants to refer to this as class warfare, that template doesn't work here.
They are not taking from the rich to spread the wealth.
They are taxing the middle class to enrich a relative few state public employees.
This is not class warfare as they have always talked about it.
I mean, you could say in one sense that it is class war in America, but not the old-fashioned classes that the Democrats like to talk about between the rich and the poor.
The workers and the bourgeoisie.
This is between the political class, government class, and everybody else.
And it's being fought in places like Wisconsin.
This is exactly what's happening.
This is an attack on the middle class, not the rich.
Make no mistake about this.
All of this involving the public sector unions is an attack on the rich, or is an attack on the middle class.
It's the middle class and their taxes that are paying for all of this.
Let me give you a quote here.
This is Bob Channon.
Bob Channan, the general counsel to the National Education Association, in his farewell address to the NEA convention last summer, here's what he said.
This is the head of the teachers' union.
Well, the legal counsel, general, the lawyer to the union.
He said, despite what some among us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas.
It is not because of the merits of our positions.
It is not because we care about children.
And it's not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.
The NEA and its affiliates are effective because we have power.
It's not that we're doing it for the kids.
It's not that we have greater ideas.
It's none of that stuff.
We have power.
That's why we are effective.
And that's what Obama knows.
So you've got an effort here to beat down the middle class.
They want to talk about class warfare all they want, but see, collective bargaining for state and public sector unions falls apart.
Collective bargaining is against the people.
The people, the vast majority of them, are middle class.
The rich are not getting soaked here to pay for public sector union people.
It's not the rich getting soaked.
It's that simple.
Providence, Rhode Island.
School District plans to send out dismissal notices to every one of its 1,926 teachers, an unprecedented move that has union leaders up in arms.
In a letter sent to all teachers Tuesday, Superintendent Tom Brady wrote that the Providence Scrule Board on Thursday will vote on a resolution to dismiss every teacher effective the last day of scruple.
In an email sent to all teachers and scrupled department staff, Brady said, We're forced to take this precautionary action by the March 1 deadline, given the dire budget outline for the 2011-2012 scruel year, in which we are projecting a near $40 million deficit for the district.
Since the full extent of the potential cuts to the school budget have yet to be determined, issuing a dismissal letter to all teachers was necessary to give the mayor, the school board, the district, maximum flexibility to consider every cost savings option, including reductions in staff.
Now, if you read the whole story, this is a legal maneuver the city is required to do if it intends to even lay off some teachers.
Even if it doesn't lay off one teacher, they'd have to send out the notice.
Now, there have been layoffs in the past.
It's probably something they've done before.
Probably only talking about layoffs and not terminations here, but the head of the teachers' union in Rhode Island is now comparing this to Pearl Harbor as they pay.
Meanwhile, as we stay in Rhode Island, this is from February 18th.
Wind power will cost Rhode Island taxpayers $1.5 million.
Deepwater Wind's initial project will raise state and local governments' electric bills by a combined $1.5 million in its first year.
Municipal electric bills will increase by a total of $1 million, while state government's bill will rise by $476,000, according to an estimate commissioned by the National Grid from Energy Security Analysts Incorporated.
Cost would rise by 3.5% every year for the next two years.
Now, you were talking about a hoax here.
One and a half million increase using wind power for Little Rhode Island.
And they tried to keep this information from public view, by the way.
Some people found out about the leak that they didn't want people to know.
See, they spread this.
Wind power is going to solve all the problems.
Wind and solar.
It's going to lower electricity bills.
It's going to make everything all that much more affordable.
No, everybody's electric bill is going to rise.
We have some sample sound bites of the prank call from the so-called journalist Ian Murphy of the Buffalo Beast, who posed as David Koch, calling the governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker.
In our first excerpt, Murphy, the journalist, term used loosely here, posing as David Koch says, I'm a little disheartened by the situation there.
Scott, what's the latest?
We're actually hanging pretty tough.
Amazingly, there's a much smaller group of protesters, almost all of whom are in from other states today.
The state assembly is taking the bill up, getting it all the way to the last point it can be at where it's unamendable, but they're waiting to pass it till the Senate's in.
But they're Senate Democrats, or excuse me, the Assembly Democrats have about 100 amendments they're going through.
The state Senate still has the 14 members missing, but what they're doing today is bringing up all sorts of other non-fiscal items, many of which are things that members in the Democratic side care about.
And each day we're going to ratchet it up a little bit.
Okay, so he's saying exactly what he says in public.
There's nothing new here.
There's no news.
And there wasn't, by the way, in the whole call, he didn't say anything that he hasn't said publicly.
So there's no gotcha here, but the media is having fun with it, all because it's a secret conversation.
And we found out about it.
We made it public, a secret conversation between Walker and a rich Republican donor.
We never hear about all the calls George Soros makes to people.
Somehow, those end up never being taped.
Then the hoaxing journalist Ian Murphy, posing as David Coke, says, Now, you're not talking to these Democrat bastards, are you?
There's one guy that's actually voted with me in a bunch of things I called on Saturday for about 45 minutes, mainly to tell him that, well, I appreciate his friendship, and he worked with us and other things.
Tell him why I wasn't going to budge.
Right.
His name is Tim Cullen.
All right.
I'll have to give that man a call.
Well, actually, in his case, I wouldn't call him, and I'll tell you why.
He's pretty reasonable, but he's not one of us.
Well, how about that?
So you're even talking to these dumb Democrat bastards?
Yeah, in fact, in his case, he's a pretty reasonable guy.
He's not one of us.
But yeah, I'm talking to him.
And then they finally had this exchange.
Bring a baseball bat.
That's what I do.
I have one in my office.
You'll be happy with that.
I got a slugger with my name on it.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
So that's it.
What was learned from that?
Oh, Walker.
Walker did end up saying, hey, look, it's Wisconsin.
It's Madison.
There's a lot of 60s protesters here still hanging around.
Let them protest.
So, I mean, there's no news here other than he got scammed by somebody pretending to be David Koch and wasn't.
So bring a baseball bat.
The impersonator says bring a baseball bat.
All right, brief timeout.
We'll take it.
We'll come back.
Try to squeeze more of your phone calls in today as we return sit-tight.
By the way, folks, if you'd like one more perspective on why so many states have arrived at huge budget shortfalls, just ask the Heritage Foundation.
They've written it all out for us from Wisconsin to Ohio, New Jersey to Michigan, and on and on.
You could make it as simple as liberals over-promising and overspending, but you and I know there's a lot more to the story than that.
One of the reasons I like Heritage style so much is that they don't hold anything back.
They lay it all out there.
And if you have well-researched facts, you can do it with the confidence of Heritage.
You can see all the facts they've got on budget shortfalls, every state, at their website, Askheritage.org.
Now, the people at Heritage putting this all together for you and I and the 700,000-plus members of Heritage are not just holed up in a Washington think tank.
They're in Wisconsin.
They're out in Ohio.
They get out.
They find out what's really going on in these places.
That's how they got time with Scott Walker in Wisconsin last Saturday, for instance, when this whole thing started to blow up there.
It's just another example of your hard-earned heritage membership dollars at work.
They do a lot of work for you.
I mean, that's what you're essentially, as a member, paying them to do.
You benefit from it in so many ways.
But they do a lot of the work for you.
Chances are, if something happening in the news, you have a question about it, they have the answer.
That's why askheritage.org.
Check the details online after the program today.
Pat in Roseville, Michigan.
I'm glad you called, sir.
Great to have you on the program.
Thank you for taking my call, Rush.
By the way, the golf swing looks pretty good.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
It is better.
There's no question.
Anyway, sir, I'm a 36-year firefighter in the Detroit area.
I've been extensively involved in contract negotiations, both police and fire.
And I think we have in Michigan the fairest form of collective bargaining there is, and that's binding arbitration, which is what we're worried about.
They're going to take away from us in Michigan.
Now, in order for us to attain any kind of raise and benefits, we have to go before an arbitrator and we have to prove ability to pay.
And of course, the city has the right to show that they don't.
If we don't prove ability to pay, we don't win anything.
And at the same time.
Wait, wait, Justice, I want to make sure I understand this.
You, the union members, have to prove that the state has the ability to pay you what you're asking?
The city.
If we're a city, the entity that you're working with.
Okay, yes.
Right.
So you have to prove the city has the money to pay you.
How in the world do you get hold of that information?
You get that through Public.
You get that through budgets.
You have to do some work sometimes.
We found our city for years.
There was millions of dollars they didn't collect in taxes.
It's a lot of work, but you do have to prove to an arbitrator.
And because of the economic conditions of Michigan, it's been a long time since anybody really gets any substantial pay raises from an arbitrator because of that.
Well, that makes sense, though, doesn't it?
I agree.
And that's why I'm saying that it's a very fair form.
But the problem is now that the state of Michigan, and you know as well as I do, have been run by some real pure idiots in some of these cities.
And I think what they want to do is create a bankruptcy type scenario for a city, bring an emergency financial manager, and throw police and firefighters under the bus without negotiations.
And as far as I'm concerned, if all public sector unions adopted binding arbitration, I think a lot of the politics and stuff that's going on would end.
Well, yeah, by definition, it would have to end if you go to binding arbitration.
And it works because even in my travels, I had the honor of meeting Governor Ingler years ago.
And Governor Ingler told me that he offered the teachers here in Michigan binding arbitration, and they refused, which I didn't think I didn't agree with at the time.
Well, it does.
Again, it's something that you have to prove to the arbitrator.
And my concern is that they want to do the easy way out.
Now, while you're trying to prove that the city, in your case, has the ability to pay, the city's trying to prove that they don't.
Correct.
Or what they'll do, they'll look at our demands and say, we can't do their demands based on what we have in the budget.
Because you see, in a public sector union, we can look at budgets, et cetera, unlike private.
Right.
So this to me, and nobody's getting it.
The only thing it was, years ago, the city I work for is very, very, very poor.
They came in, they threw us on the street.
They said, you're all gone and replaced us with the sheriffs.
We were under a petition to go to arbitration.
And the judge ruled they can't do what they did to us, which is fair.
Because if they're going to come in, if you're a police officer and firefighter and you're doing the jobs that we do, and you're worried that tomorrow a financial manager is going to come in and throw you on your ears without any kind of negotiations, and we can't strike, and we can't slow down, and we can't use politics.
We have to use absolute figures to go before an arbitrator.
Let me take what you have explained and what you apparently believe and agree with.
Let's make you a teacher in Wisconsin.
And the governor is telling you, look, we got a $3.6 billion deficit.
In other words, we don't have any money.
Now, we want you to contribute 5-something percent to your health care and 12% to your pension payment.
And we want you to forego collective bargaining in the future.
Otherwise, we're going to have to start laying people off because we don't have the money.
And it's apparently public.
I mean, they're not lying about not having anybody yet.
Nobody has any money.
Everybody knows.
No state has any money right now.
What would your reaction be to what's going on in Michigan if you're a teacher in Mississippi, Wisconsin, and you're hearing all this?
Well, my reaction, well, I look at my situation.
We do contribute to our health care.
We do contribute, as a matter of fact, to our new members now have 401ks.
And if you've got to bend, you got to bend.
My concern is, and my only concern is the fact that if you take away collective bargaining, the ability to be at the table and have a referee there, abuse can go to the other side, too.
Well, you're not really talking about collective.
You're talking binding arbitration.
You're not talking collective bargaining.
Collective bargaining.
You can hold somebody up by going, if you've got a binding arbitrator who's going to make a decision, and that's that, that's a whole different thing.
Well, I agree, but I think if this was adopted by pretty much every public sector union, a lot of this stuff would, a lot of the politics would end.
Obviously.
So what do you think the odds of that happening, say, in Wisconsin are?
I don't think it sounds to me that the Democratic Party wants to continue to create demonstrations, et cetera.
Damn straight they do.
Which I don't, as a union man all my life, I totally disagree.
You know, the job is your job as a union person and your only job is to represent the people that voted you in.
And that's it.
When you start getting in the bed with political parties, et cetera, just like you said a hundred times, you know, you get important.
You get to go to conventions.
You get to sit up at the foot.
That's exactly what I've seen.
You hit the nail on the head.
They want the unrest.
They want all of this that's going on.
This is a tough thing for people to accept.
Understand, they can't relate to it yet, but yet they see it happen.
And there is an attack here.
This is a new kind of class warfare.
This is no longer an attack on the rich.
These unions, public sector, are attacking the middle class.
That's who the bad guys are now with the so-called collective bargaining of public sector unions.
Who's paying after all?
Middle class is paying.
Not some evil corporation, not some evil CEO, not some fat cat.
And look it out there, folks.
Don't panic over my last conversation with the guy on binding arbitration.
Just having a conversation with him to figure out where he was coming from and all this.
Binding arbitration cuts out the taxpayers.
If the people want to cut back and the arbitrator disagrees, he's in essence the judge.
And people, meaning the people that run the city in his case.
And of course, you might even say, well, the standard he just described is union has to go and improve the city can pay them.
What if the city says, I can pay somebody else a lot less than I'm paying you to get the job done?
Why isn't that an acceptable standard?
The union says, you can pay.
You can afford to pay us this much.
Well, yeah, but I could get somebody to do the same job for less than what I'm paying you.
Well, that's what we got a union for.
You can't do that.
But at the end of the day, this caller, nevertheless, he's fully aware there's some kind of conspiracy afoot to create an emergency.
And there is an emergency.
There's no question.
And it has been created.
And we find ourselves right smack dab in the middle of it.
Look, arbitrators are not going to solve the money laundering problem.
And the money laundering problem remains the big thing.
You're still going to have these people, however they arrive at it, their dues are still going to end up in the Democrat Party coffers.
Now, as a taxpayer, I don't trust arbitration.
It's why we select representatives to do this job.
They shouldn't farm it out.
So don't misunderstand here.
I think a lot of this stuff needs to be cleaned up.
It's too entrenched and out of balance for a particular political party.
You know, sometimes I look at how I do business compared to all these other entities, and I just marvel at it.
It's not at all the same in terms of employee compensation, benefits packages and so forth.
I just have an entirely different mindset about it than a lot of people do.
When I pay people, I expect a bunch of things.
And I don't want anybody distracted, and I don't want anybody bothered by traditional compensation problems.
I probably pay far more than I have to, but it's worth it to me for the productivity that ends up as a result.
It's all worth it to me.
Everybody goes about this in different ways.
This is why, you know, but if people work for me who are members of a union, it would be so different.
There wouldn't be any personal relationship that I would have with the employees, anything at all.
I'd be dealing with people that I would not think are in my best interests, not looking out for me and the company to do well.
That would not be their concern.
It's so many different business models for doing all this, which is why I have always said what I've said about joining a union.
I mean, feel free if you want to, if that's what you want to do, you go right ahead, but understand what happens to you when you do.
You have become a vessel for one political party to triumph.
You give up your individuality.
You're no better than anybody else, even if you are.
It doesn't matter.
You're going to make what everybody else makes because that's the deal, no matter what kind of work you do.
If people that worked for me had an arbitrator, I mean, the idea that I could pay them more than what I'm paying, there's not an arbitrator around who would not agree with that.
Does the official Obama criticizer have an arbitrator?
No.
The official Obama criticizer does not have an arbitrator.
Doesn't want one, in fact.
But my point is, let's just take a multi-billion dollar company, multi-billion dollar company, and let's say one of its employees makes $100,000 a year.
It clearly has much more than that.
It can afford to pay somebody.
What if an arbitrator said, well, you can pay that guy more than $100,000, and that's the end of the day?
That's the end of it.
Buy-buy business.
If that's the only consideration, buy-by business.
That can't possibly work.
So I don't want any of you to misunderstand.
Binding arbitration is a trap at the end of the day.
Except maybe in case of year-long impases and that kind of thing.
I've got some Chris Christie audio soundbites here I want to get in before the program.
And Rumsfeld conducted a seminar with Andrea Mitchell, NBC News in Washington, on how to not accept the premise put forth in question after question after question.
But Christie in Trenton spoke about concessions being asked to public employees in New Jersey.
Let's start with audio soundbite number 10.
It's from his budget address and yesterday afternoon in Trenton, here's the first, I got several soundbites here.
Here's one.
For too many years, our government has operated under the belief that the baseline, the place where you begin, is to continue to fund every program in the budget, regardless of the fiscal climate, regardless of the economy, and regardless of the effectiveness of the program.
Well, not anymore.
You need to build a realistic budget from the bottom up.
You fund what you need this year to succeed.
Not every relic from two decades ago that's still on the books.
The baseline is zero.
Zero-based budgeting, which I promised in the campaign, has finally come to New Jersey.
Now, this very smart, very wise baseline budgeting, most people don't know what baseline budgeting is.
And I spent back in the mid-90s a full three-hour program explaining it.
Might be able to give you a brief summary of it in a couple of segments.
But essentially, let's take the federal budget.
Take any item in the budget you want, any department, any sub-department of any department, and it has a budget.
The baseline for that budget is the current level of spending with no factors whatsoever considered.
Did all of it get spent this year?
Was there any left over?
Did you need more?
How was it spent?
Was it effectively spent?
It doesn't matter.
And with the federal budget, there's an automatic assumption that 10%, 8%, whatever, is automatic as an increase.
So that if the actual budget only goes up 4%, people run around and say, oh, there's a 4% cut here.
When there hasn't been a 4% percent, there's been a 4% increase, but it's not the full 8% that was targeted.
The baseline is such that basically allows people to claim cuts in a budget when there aren't any.
Zero-based budgeting means you start with a clean slate every year.
Okay, we might have given you $2 million last year.
We're not going to automatically start at $2,200,000 this year.
We're going to start at zero again.
We're going to look at what you did with that $2 million, where it went, how you spent it.
Did you spend less?
What happens is, as we all know, Health and Human Services advertises for food staff applicants toward the end of the fiscal year so that they don't get shortchanged the next year when their budget comes out.
So Christie's here talking about starting from zero, clean slate.
He then said this.
In Wisconsin and Ohio, they have decided there can no longer be two classes of citizens.
One that receives rich health and pension benefits and all the rest who are left to pay for them.
The promises of the past are too expensive and the prospects of the future are too important to stay on the old failed course.
Across the country, we have come to a moment.
The moment for real change and the return to fiscal discipline.
He's right, and it's not just in Wisconsin.
It's near New Jersey.
It's coming to Indiana.
It's coming to Ohio.
It's going to happen to every state that's in this problem.
And the number one expense, number one place that they have to cut is this irresponsible, mindless spending on people, like he just said.
One class of citizen that receives rich health and pension benefits and the rest of us who are left to pay for it.
We've gotten to a period of out of balance now so that the people receiving all the benefits get twice what the people paying for them get.
Unsustainable.
Cannot happen.
We have a war here between the government bureaucrat and the rest of us, and that's what this is.
I don't care what the job is.
Teacher, whatever the union employee is, the bureaucrat.
That's the new war.
That's the new class struggle.
That's the new class warfare, not rich versus poor.
The government bureaucrat versus the rest of us.
The government bureaucrat happens to be unionized.
And that's where we are.
And that's not going to go away anytime soon.
You got Democrats running around and we need to make it bloody in the streets here.
And I'm sure they full well intend to.
Hey, I want you to hear some of this Donald Rumsfeld with angry Mitchell and BC News Washington.
Yesterday afternoon on her show, she starts out having a discussion about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and intelligence.
That intelligence unit, that analysis unit in the Pentagon was stovepiping information, intelligence information.
What do you mean stovepiping?
Mr. Secretary, you know what stovepiping means.
I don't know the government.
It was keeping intelligence information away from other units, not permitting people in the CIA and elsewhere, and not permitting Colin Powell to know all of the factors.
Oh, that's not true.
That is factually not true.
Oh, how about this?
So she's taken up for Colin Powell.
So apparently Colin Powell's been running around saying the weapons of mass destruction.
Well, nobody, you know, we weren't allowed to see the intelligent was being stovepiped.
We weren't allowed to see it.
He's trying to do everything he can to distance himself because they sent him up there, if you recall, due to the slideshow on the weapons of mass destruction.
He was profoundly embarrassed by that.
The ruling class shunned him a bit.
So he's trying to blame it on Rumsfeld and others for stovepiping it.
That's factually not true.
That is not true.
It didn't happen.
She says.
You don't take any responsibility for what?
Any responsibility for the fact that information was that there was misleading information that got to Colin Powell and others before that UN presentation on weapons of mass destruction?
Colin Powell probably had more experience dealing with intelligence products than anyone in the government who was at a senior level, more than George Tennant.
Oh, this is fascinating.
So Powell's been running around telling everybody that nobody told him they made a fool out of him sending him up there and Rumsfeld's not falling for it.
And so she said, well, you have written that the media image of Colin Powell battling the forces of unilateralism, conservatism may have been beneficial to Powell in some circles, but he doesn't jive with reality.
The reality was that Powell tended not to speak out at NSC or principals meetings in strong opposition to the views of the president or his colleagues.
That's my recollection of the meetings.
He was very professional in his handling it.
He's a fine man.
I enjoyed working with him.
You weren't aware of his opposition to the war.
Not in any meetings I attended at the NSC level or even in our lunches that he was.
I just didn't ever hear that.
that's a fact you have also written i wouldn't have written it So fascinating, isn't it here?
So look at what Andrew Mitchell's believed all of these years now, but I'm sure a lot of other drive-by media people have believed.
Well, so you're talking to Rumsfeld, Rums.
I don't know what you're talking about.
He never said a word in protest on the war.
He never said one time he was against it.
I wouldn't have written it if he had.
This is fascinating stuff, folks.
Yeah.
Huh.
What do I make of it?
Haven't I pretty much told you what I make of it?
It sounds to me like somebody's been in a big CYA mode here for a couple of years.
The cover's been blown.
Boy, it's amazing how Colin Powell didn't get the information.
Remember back in 1998, we had all these soundbites of Democrats who believed that when Clinton told them they had weapons of mass destruction, they might have to do something about Saddam.
And we heard about it in the 2000s, and they sent Powell up to do the slideshow, and he'd apparently been telling people that he didn't know anything about it, and that they lied to him.
He wasn't allowed to, hear any intelligence.
He was totally opposed to the war.
And Rumsfeld, when told about this, said, huh?
What?
I don't know what you're talking about.
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