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April 25, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:24
April 25, 2011, Monday, Hour #2
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We are back.
It's the fastest three hours in media, hosted by me, the inimitable, often imitated, never duplicated L. Rushbo behind the golden EIB microphone.
Our telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
We will get to your phone calls in this hour.
Why?
Because we said we would.
And that's why it'll happen.
I want to go back and review here.
Jack Kelly in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Unions on the ropes.
Public employees fighting back, but they seem almost sure to lose.
Do you have that opinion?
You don't, Snerdley?
Yeah, I think a lot of people want that to be the case, but they seem almost sure to lose.
It's like the smart money in the NFL work stoppage, that players are going to lose at the end of the day.
Well, it could be big.
You know, that NFL situation, the way the lawyers are running out of the player's side, just as a brief aside here, if you're not following it because it bores you, you ought to know that the union's lawyers, the players' lawyers, are actually advocating to blow up the whole system.
No more draft.
Every college player is a free agent, a high school player, free agent.
The league can recruit players from wherever they want and for whatever.
There'd be no salary cap, no minimum, no nothing.
If the league tells a punter you're going to make $10,000 a year, that's what you make.
Or U.S. minimum wage, that's what you make.
There are some lawyers, some of the players, I'm convinced, don't even really know what their own lawyers are actually pushing for.
But the smart money there in the NFL strike is at the end of the day, the owners are going to win.
They've got the money to hold out and go to the map for what they want, much easier and longer than the players can.
And the smart money is also saying the same thing about state public unions.
And again, it's predicated on what's real.
The money to sustain them as they've always existed just isn't there.
States cannot print money.
You know, this is the one thing that we sit here and we look at the Democrat Party union alignment as this all-powerful monolith that nothing can be done to stop.
But what is it that props it up?
What is it that gives its power?
It's money.
And there isn't any.
And states can't just borrow.
They can't print like the federal government.
Now, Obama can continue to try stimulus packages, which are nothing more than slush funds and bailouts for states.
But that takes us to this something I want to get to today at some point, because Britt Hume, I think it was yesterday on Fox, joined me.
So now there are two voices that I know of who are using common sense and intelligence guided by experience, who say if the election were held today, Obama would lose in a landslide.
He would lose and he would lose bad.
And yet, our old buddy Walter Williams got this piece floating around the internet, how Obama's re-election is automatic.
It's already done.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding that Walter Williams did not?
cannot tell you how relieved I am to know that.
That somebody stole Walter Williams' idea.
They ran a syndicated column under his name and it wasn't he who wrote it?
Well, hallelujah.
Well, anyway, we had a story last week from Larry Sabato, political scientist University of Virginia at the Sabato Center.
And he had analyzed as a political scientist all his data.
And he concluded, yeah, if the election's held today, I mean, not much Republicans can do.
Of course, he left many caveats available.
But how can the November elections turn out the way they did and Obama win re-election if it were held today, six months later?
Would somebody explain to me how that works?
Well, Russia, the way it goes is you got to look at electoral votes.
You've got to look at the Electoral College.
You've got to look at states and leaning and all this.
No, no.
I...
Elections are about things that matter.
Elections have consequences and they are about issues.
And there is this notion that Obama is a shoe-in or that his re-election is easy, folks, that is one of the biggest scams that they're trying to perpetrate on us yet.
We're approaching $5 a gallon gasoline.
We've got a lot of people's homes worthless, or at least underwater.
We've got no relief on the job.
There's not one positive thing happening.
We've got a guy in the White House who's urging people and telling people how to downsize their lives and their expectations.
And we are told that this is the recipe for re-election victory.
I'm sorry, but I just don't buy this.
I think Obama is a landslide loser if the election's today.
Big time landslide loser.
You know, I don't understand.
Well, I take that back.
I do understand.
Fear can cause a lot of common sense to get clouded.
Fear can overcome common sense and basic understanding.
But there's nothing in the history of American politics that suggests that what's happening here are resume enhancers.
You know, traditional question, you're better off now than you were two and a half years ago when Obama took office.
No matter what question you ask, we are worse off.
The country's worse off.
A majority of our people are worse off.
We got stories like I led with today, IMF, the American era over.
Sorry, ain't going to happen on my watch.
That just isn't going to happen.
And a president worth his salt would not let that happen on his watch.
And we got a president engineering it.
And don't for a moment believe the American people don't see that.
They do.
Otherwise, November would not have happened.
November is going to, otherwise, Wisconsin would not have happened in November.
And I don't care, recount Richmond.
The fact is, that Supreme Court election, the Democrats lost it by 7,000 votes in a huge commi-lib state.
So when Jack Kelly has his story, public employees are fighting back, but they seem almost sure to lose.
They are losing.
That's what nobody's...
They are losing.
Now, they happen to be making a lot of noise and scaring people and causing a lot of public unrest.
Some of the highlights of Mr. Kelly's piece.
To see how grim is the outlook for public employee unions, let's go to Detroit.
Mayor Dave Bing proposed Tuesday a budget which would cut contributions to public employee health plans by 20% and would skip a payment to city pension funds.
And this is labor union capital USA.
Dave Bing said if we do nothing by 2015, fringe benefits are unpaid to consume half of our entire general fund revenue.
Fringe benefits.
Benefits.
Man, that's a word that's starting to really grate on me, too.
Benefits for what?
What are you doing to deserve your benefits?
I also realized this.
There's going to be hell to pay when this spigot stops.
There's going to be hell to, we're seeing it now.
We're seeing it now in Europe.
Seeing it in Greece.
We're seeing it in Spain, Portugal up next.
These are all products of liberal socialist utopian promises.
And now their money's running out.
And they don't know how to work.
They don't know how to go get a job.
Their version of work is not work.
Their version of work is a job.
Working for the government.
And their primary interest is vacation and sick days and benefits.
The work they do is, for the most part, the last part of the equation that they're interested in.
But when there's no money, it's going to affect a lot of people.
There are a lot of people.
I'm not talking about the welfare roles here.
I'm talking about union people, state, city, township, whatever governments that are going to have to start cutting back, laying off, reducing retirement packages.
There's going to be hell to pay when the money's not there.
Yeah, I think, like Greece kind of hell, yeah, it's a lot of people.
Well, reacting to diminished services is another part of the equation, but that's, you know, that's that's going to happen later on down the line.
The protests, how here's the better question.
This is going to be the real test.
Let's say that all this stuff actually happens.
Let's say that every state goes the route of Wisconsin.
Let's say California does it.
Let's say that Michigan does it.
And let's just apply them.
Let's say that the public sector unions, all in, have to get by on 40 to 50 percent less than they're used to now.
Who, or better yet, can the private sector make that up?
Well, no, it can't right away.
The private sector, no, no, snerdly, where can they go to get work that will pay them enough to make up for what they're going to lose?
Will there be private sector jobs for these people to go get, since Obama's destroying that too?
Will there be enough private sector jobs for public sector workers to go get as second or third jobs to make up for what they're going to lose when the state and cities can't pay them what they're being paid?
And if the private sector doesn't have the jobs, that's when the hell's going to start.
That's when it's going to get dicey, if you ask me.
The welfare state's going to collapse along with everything else.
There's no money, folks.
The only solution to this is going to be self-reliance.
The only solution to this is going to be entrepreneurism and rugged individualism.
And you know what this crowd thinks of that.
We are here because rugged individualism and self-reliance are two naughty terms.
Social Darwinism and all of that.
So, it's going to be interesting decade ahead of us if all this stuff happens, if people like Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette are accurate.
It isn't the modest cuts.
Let me read some more from his piece here.
It isn't the modest cuts in contributions to health and pension plans in Wisconsin's labor, the bill, Governor Walker's bill, labor leaders object to most.
It isn't even the restriction of collective bargaining to wages only.
It's the provision which makes payment of union dues voluntary.
Now, we've mentioned that in Wisconsin, that really is at this point, because that's the number one issue for leadership.
Right now, the union dues are an automatic deduction, just like your FICA or your tax.
There's nothing you can do, it gets automatically deducted.
Walker's bill says, oh, no, it's not anymore.
The union employee is going to have to write that check.
Then it becomes voluntary.
And that's when the union gets threatened because that busts up the money laundering train.
And that's what bugs the leadership.
Now, the rank and file is going to be concerned about what happens to wages.
The rank and file will be concerned about their contributions to health and pension plans.
That's their back pocket.
The union leadership, yeah, heck with that.
They are worried about the provision which makes payment of union dues voluntary.
And that, writes Mr. Kelly, who's very astute here, a body blow to Democrats, too.
They depend heavily on unions to fill their campaign coffers.
That's an understatement.
It's a money laundering scheme.
They don't depend on it.
They are one in the same.
Democrat campaign coffers are the state public employee unions.
They collect campaign donations in the form of union dues, which are paid for by the taxes of the average ordinary John and Jane Doe, who have no clue what they're doing.
Their taxes are deducted.
You tell the average John and Jane Doe that, what is it, 3-4% of their taxes end up at the Democrat Party automatically?
Okay, so you've got two factors here on the union side.
You've got the rank and file, and they will be concerned about what happens to their health and pension implants and their wages.
Leadership, I couldn't care about that.
They care about the dues.
Now, you've got another potential nuclear blast waiting to go up there between the rank and file and the leadership over divergent, different interests or causes in all this.
Then you add to this, in Wisconsin, the union bosses, what did they spend?
$3 million?
And they lost that election?
They spent $3 million in a Supreme Court election and they lost.
And up next, they're going to try to recall a bunch of Republican state senators and they're going to spend even more trying to do that.
Now, imagine if 20% of their members decided not to pay dues.
Well, they wouldn't have the money, and they'd be in heap big trouble.
Mr. Kelly, well, I'll give you his conclusion.
I got to take a break.
He has kind of a fiery conclusion to this when we get back.
And we're back.
Okay, here's Jack.
Jack, Jack, what's your joke?
Come on.
Jack Kelly, right?
I'd have remembered it if it was St. Patrick's Day.
Jack Kelly, wrapping up his piece here, but they'll be rear guard actions.
Some public employee unions may try to win public support by attacking the public.
Though thuggery is unappealing to most Americans, union bosses will win some of these fights, but they'll be rear guard actions like those fought by the Nazis during their retreats to the Rhine and the Elbe.
We're flat broke.
This dooms them.
We don't have any money.
It may also doom the Democrat Party, which is a coalition of special interest groups with little more in common than their desire to feed from the public trough.
Boy, that is so true.
Well, no, that's it.
The Democrat Party is a loose-knit bunch of coalitions that have a couple of three things in common.
One of them, the major with big government.
That's essentially it.
And it requires a never-ending cycle of taxpayer money laundered to the federal and state governments back to the Democrats.
That's what it requires.
But there's no money.
We are flat broke.
Come and grab a call.
Let's go to Alicia in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
You're up first today, hi.
Oh, thank you, Rush.
And it's such an honor.
Okay, just one real quick question.
When did the word profit become a dirty word in this country?
I think in politics, profit has always been a target of the American left.
In my lifetime, to answer your question, the intense attack on profit occurred during the 80s with Reaganomics, supply-side economics, which worked.
But it's always been.
It's always part of the FDR talked about it in a negative sense.
It's always been part of class envy, a strategy that the Democrat Party, the American left, has used.
Maybe we should take an example from their book and just change the word.
You know, when they don't like a word, they change it.
Like taxes are now incentives and stuff.
Maybe we should change it to a little more than expenses.
Well, they taxes our investments.
They refuse to tax us as investors.
You know, I prefer education.
I prefer that more and more people understand what profit is.
Profit has been impugned and denigrated as something evil.
Profit equals theft to too many people.
And the people that believe that or who are made to believe it have also been made to believe that the objective throughout society is that everybody has the same thing, that everybody has the same income, and nobody has anything more than anybody else.
And it's Pure ignorance.
But the thing that undergirds that and makes these people believe in it is this whole notion of fairness.
And that really is where they focus on profit being unfair.
It's not fair.
And who wants unfairness in a society?
That's how they play it.
Talent on loan from God, Rush Limbaugh, starting a million conversations.
All right, the Walter Williams email proclaiming Barack Obama's re-election as essentially a done deal, impossible to stop, was a New Year's Day hoax.
Some are claiming that it was orchestrated by moveon.org.
Nobody knows for sure, but it definitely was a hoax.
Presumably an April Fools article.
And a lot of people were affected by, you know, Walter Williams, occasional guest host here.
I was overrun emails from people who, well, Rush say it is so.
Walter Williams say Obama can't be stopped.
They're hoaxing this.
Folks, everything they do is a hoax.
That's not an exaggeration.
Global warming, it's a hoax.
Man destroying the climate, a hoax.
Or fraud.
I mean, one of the whatever.
So now they've got to rely on a hoax to try to dispirit you in thinking Obama can't be beat.
Folks, he is politically dead meat if the election is today.
And they know it in the White House.
If he's such a shoe-in, why in the hell do they run around trying to raise a billion dollars to spend on his reelection?
Well, one reason is, I think, to keep Democrat challengers out of the race.
And don't doubt me on this.
I'll bet you that in the deep, dark crevices of the secret hiding places of liberalism, there are a bunch of people toying with the idea of running against Obama.
He's destroying the Democrat Party along with the country.
It's right in front of our faces.
We don't want to say it because now nothing can destroy the Democratic Party.
Nothing could destroy liberalism.
They are destroying themselves.
Take a look around the world.
Show for me a liberal triumph in the real sense where it gets sustained by virtue of happiness, love, joy, and contentment.
The only way liberalism, socialism, communism is sustained is at the point of a gun.
I find it interesting.
We are in one of the worst economic periods in this nation's history.
And there is some doubt there's, let's put it a different way.
There are people who think the president's an automatic shoe-in for re-election.
Gas prices shooting up.
Look, the left is paranoid about this.
Audio soundbite number four, Jacob Tapper.
Good morning, America today.
He's talking to George Stephanopoulos.
And this is Jake Tapper in crisis because gas prices are a crisis.
And why are gas prices a crisis?
Because they are hurting President Obama.
Stephanopoulos says these gas prices, they're also knocking down Obama's poll numbers, which is why he's out there really every day addressing the problem.
Right now, gas prices are weighing heavily on people.
They could be a roadblock to his reelection.
When President Obama was sworn in, gas averaged $1.84 a gallon.
Today, it's $3.86.
71% of Americans say the rising price of gasoline is causing them financial hardship.
President Obama says there's no quick fix.
After all, what can a president do?
Four in 10 Americans say gas prices are causing them a serious economic hardship.
And those Americans are much more apt to say they won't even consider voting for President Obama's reelection.
Let me tell you something, folks.
Gasoline prices are now affecting people's behavior.
When you start having to make decisions regarding should I stay or should I go, and then the decision more often than not is I should stay, that's not going to redound well to the president.
Hey, Jake, it's nice to know that presidents can't do anything about it now.
That was not the fact back in 2005 and 2006, was it?
Now, remember John Kerry during the campaign of 2004?
You remember what Lurch said he'd do?
What did he say he would do?
He said he'd go over there to Saudi Arabia and he'd jawbone those guys.
He'd go over there and he'd give them what, for John Kerry, who served in Vietnam and threw his fake medals over the White House fence.
He'd go over there and he'd give them holy hell.
Yeah, in fact, he did.
He accused, almost accused Bush of having a sweetheart deal with the Saudis to keep the price up or down or whatever it was to benefit Bush.
He was so John Kerry.
Oh, yeah, but now, now you say, oh, nothing presidents can do.
Damn it.
Oh, gosh, it's going to hurt his re-election.
Damn it, George, what can we do?
I don't know.
I've got to find a way to blame it on Palin.
Maybe Bush.
Which is what they're doing.
Every time you look at the record number of people running out of gasoline, they are afraid to pull in and fill up.
They are coaxing mileage that they don't have.
The price they pay for a tank of gas has more than doubled since Obama was immulated.
You heard Jacob Tapper here.
A buck 84 to 386.
That's more than doubled.
The prices that gasoline stations display on their signs, they're free ads for Republicans.
It's free advertising for Republicans.
I want to know where $4.09 a gallon says re-elect Obama.
Where does it say that?
Where does $4.10 a gallon say Obama's a shoe-in?
It doesn't.
It says vote Republican.
That's what our buddy Jacob Tapper knows.
That's what they all know at the regime.
When you're used to paying $30 for a fill-up and now it's $65, that's hope and change thrown right back in Obama's face.
When you're used to paying $50 and now it's over $100 to fill up, that's having the judgment to lead thrown back in your face.
Folks, forget the media spin and the burying of hardship stories about Americans who can't afford to get to work or school.
Don't worry.
Don't worry, the media is not covering this.
They're starting to now.
They can't ignore it.
Every minute of every day along American roads and highways are signs reminding them that elections have consequences.
And those signs right now are the gasoline price per gallon that you see as you head down the highway on the road.
So Obama's election will be reevaluated several times a day by drivers who don't normally think about such things so far before an election.
And those signs, $3.86 a gallon, $4.09 a gallon, $5 a gallon, nation's capital, those signs equal the cost of living in Obamaville.
And now they are at the top of everybody's mind.
Every time an American decides not to drive somewhere due to the price of gasoline, that's Obamaville.
Oh, they can try to blame it on Bush all they want, but it isn't going to fly.
Back to unions.
This is, of all places in the Los Angeles Times, 70% of Californians, and this is hard to believe too.
70% of Californians are for caps on union benefits.
Californians, a cap on pensions and a later retirement age, even for current public employees, are supported by the poll's respondents.
California voters want government employees to give up some retirement benefits to help ease the state's financial problems, favoring a cap on pensions and a later age for collecting them, according to a new poll.
Voters appear ready to embrace changes not just for future hires, but also for current employees who have been promised the benefits under contract.
70% of respondents said they supported a cap on pensions for current and future public employees.
Nearly as many, 68% approved of raising the amount of money government workers should be required to contribute to their own retirement.
Increasing the age at which government employees may collect pensions was favored by 52%.
70% favored this.
In California, the pollster is Stanley Greenberg, Clinton's pollster.
This is Greenberg-Carville.
Pretty.
Oh, Carville wasn't part of this.
Greenberg was, yeah, but it was a joint Republican was part of the poll as well.
All right.
But Greenberg said that it's pretty clear here that there's broad support for making changes in the area of pensions.
The poll was done for the Los Angeles Times and the USC Dornzeif College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
That's Stanley Greenberg, Snurdley.
DeRosa, Laura DeRoe, Laura DeRoza, Rosa DeLaura, Rosa DeLaura's husband, right.
The Clinton's longtime pollster, Carville's longtime business partner.
That Stanley Greenberg.
70% of Californians are for caps on union benefits.
Greenberg himself was involved on the Democrat side of the poll.
Even he admits it shows something has to be done to curb runaway union pensions.
In the story, though, this ends up getting blamed on envy by a union boss.
The union boss is saying that the reason for 70 cents is the private sector employees have envy.
In the story, yeah, a union leader says, well, this poll, I don't, you know, we don't count this because it's clear that the people of the poll just are jealous of the great benefit package we have.
No, Mr. Union thug, it's because they know they're paying for it.
And they're paying you and your union membership more than they are earning.
Just ain't fair.
And don't forget, folks, the gasoline price is the one data point that the government cannot fudge.
Commerce Department can't fudge it.
Labor Department can't do anything about it.
They can't tweak it.
They can't tell you it isn't what it is.
They can't say there is no inflation.
I mean, they can do that, but they can't tell you the gas price isn't what it is when that's what you're paying for.
Here's Richard and Jupiter, Florida.
Great to have you, sir, on the program from right up the road.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, it's an honor.
It's funny.
I suspect there'll be a federal agency coming up with a plan any day now to ban gasoline advertising from all interstates, and it'll be fast-tracked to the president.
But anyway, I actually know what that no more price signs on the absolutely anyway.
The GM thing just gets me infuriated because, you know, every bankruptcy in history of that scale, I mean, there was something wrong with the company, the product, or whatever, which is not the case here.
The only problem was the unions and their unfunded pensions, their obstacle salaries, paying for workers that don't go to work.
So, and for the first time ever, a bankruptcy that large, not only the shareholders get wiped out, which is typical, but the bondholders got wiped out, and they don't even talk about it.
They did not fund any of the bondholders or the holders of the preferred stock, and yet they don't talk at all about how the pensions fared in that, which is to say, they all came out whole.
You know, I've had a lot of people ask me when this subject comes up, the same thing happened with Chrysler.
What do you mean, the bondholders, Rush?
Would you explain the bondholders?
Yeah, and when you understand it, it's even worse when you understand it.
You can buy stock in a company, or you can buy bonds in a company, just like you can buy treasuries or municipal bonds.
You can buy Chrysler General Motor bonds, or you could.
As a bondholder, you are a more preferred customer.
You're higher on the ladder than a stockholder is.
And in the case of Chrysler specifically, I think General Motors to an extent, when it came to the bankruptcy finalization, it was Obama's administration that told the bondholders, screw you, and they got nothing.
And when they wanted value for their investment, they were told they were greedy.
So the value of the company was transferred to the AFL-CIO.
So basically, what the General Motors bailout was was nothing more than finally putting the right people in ownership, and that is the union leaders.
They should have owned the company all along.
It's not fair that the workers didn't own it.
Second thing was the actual money was used to shore up the pension and health care benefits, which were also going to flitter away to practically nothing.
And don't forget, General Motors has been forgiven all of its taxes for years to come.
And they're still reporting losses.
But yeah, the bondholders who would be the first on any list of reimbursement and bankruptcy got zilch.
They were told to go pound sand.
And then when they opposed and wanted to be part of the negotiation to have some value, they were called greedy by Obama.
General Motors said that the government was preventing them from offering bondholders more than 10% of the restructured company because in Obama's view, the bondholders are just simple speculators.
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