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Sept. 8, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:20
September 8, 2011, Thursday, Hour #3
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Hi, folks.
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Here are the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address, L. Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
You know, my story about Alan Cranston, and this is important here on this social security business.
If you go back to 1984 and you're talking about Social Security recipients, those are people whose experiences with presidents are FDR, Truman, and JFK, LBJ, this sort of thing, Eisenhower.
Now, I can't believe this.
I, El Rushbo, am 60.
So theoretically, I am five years away from Social Security, right?
What age do you start getting it?
I mean, if you play by the rules, 65?
Okay.
So I'm five years away from getting it.
I don't know.
I mean, my impression FDR is he ain't God.
My point is that seasoned citizens today are more likely to have had their presidential experiences be with people like Nixon and Reagan and Bush and so forth, not FDR.
So the whole effort that the Democrats make of trying to tell senior citizens that the Republicans want to kick you out of your house and take your money away from you, they've been saying it for so many years and it's never happened.
I don't think the audience is there for it anymore.
I don't think it works.
But it's a page from their playbook.
They don't give up and they're not going to give up.
But I just don't think it works.
I think if you look, isn't Tea Party membership, isn't it noteworthy because of the number of seasoned citizens that are members?
So I think you can throw the book out on the whole class envy technique the Democrats have used in Social Security to scare all these old people into voting for Democrats.
I don't think it works yet.
The evidence here is clear in Florida.
It doesn't.
Okay, now I've found out who this Douglas Rushkoff guy is, a media theorist, a media theorist, the author of Program or Be Program, 10 Commands for a Digital Age, and also Life Inc., How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back.
So that's who's written the piece at CNN.com, Are Jobs Obsolete?
A media theorist.
What the hell is a media theorist?
Now, he's got a Wikipedia entry.
But everybody has a Wikipedia entry, just like everybody has a radio show.
He was born in 1961, so he's 50.
He's an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian, best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.
So he's a media theorist who writes comic books.
So it's quite understandable here that CNN would give him a soapbox.
By the way, the FBI has raided the headquarters of Solyndra.
This is Obama's green energy giant, green energy example, the solar panel crowd that went bankrupt last week.
Well, I don't know, but if the FBI has confirmed the raid, it would be logical to assume that this is the regime's FBI, so maybe they're collecting evidence to keep it under wraps.
Rather than be explained.
Anyway, are jobs obsolete?
On the day Obama's going to give his big speech on jobs, the U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans.
Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically or simply shut down altogether.
That's 600,000 people will be out of work, another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.
We can blame a right-wing attempt to undermine labor or a left-wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks, but the real culprit is email.
People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment, other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.
New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures.
From easy passes ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers are obsolete.
Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do.
But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately for less money and without any health insurance costs.
And it doesn't ask for a day off to take care of a cat.
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher-level work.
Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots.
But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.
And so the president goes on TV telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs, as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work.
But it seems to me there's something backwards in that logic.
I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.
I'm afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem?
And I understand that we all want paychecks, or at least money.
We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us.
But do we all really want jobs?
We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal.
Employment is.
And that's because at a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need.
America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population, with just a fraction of us actually working.
No, my nose started running.
This is...
This is Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist at CNN.com.
America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everybody in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day.
And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crops and dairy just to keep market prices high.
Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.
Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff, it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve the stuff.
Wait a minute, we don't have enough ways for people to work, but yet he just said we don't need people working.
I shall nevertheless continue here.
Jobs as such are a relatively new concept.
Did you know that, folks?
Jobs are a new concept, relatively so.
People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people worked for themselves.
They made shoes, they plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people who then traded or paid for those goods and services.
By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.
The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked.
And so they invented the chartered monopoly.
By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead.
From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a job.
Now, while this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad it is for people.
You see, workers and unions are not people.
Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place?
The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment?
Might the spirit of enterprise that we currently associate with career be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, even meaningful.
Instead, we're attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance.
What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we've generated through our technologies and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.
The communist answer to the question was to just distribute everything evenly, but that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised.
The opposite libertarian answer, and the way we seem to be going right now, would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer, cut social services along with their jobs and hope they fade into the distance.
Is that what we're doing?
Is that what we're doing now?
We're just cutting loose the people and letting them suffer out there.
We're cutting social services along with their jobs.
I'll tell you what, I think Obama's putting this crackpot theory to the test.
That's what having a small number of people working to support the rest of the country is exactly what Obama's doing.
This crackpots theory is in process here of being implemented.
We're all a bunch of guinea pigs here.
We didn't know it.
Mr. Rushkoff sounds here like he's sitting in some frat house after a night of too many hits on the bong, folks.
He says here, we start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights.
The work we do, the value we create, is for the rest of what we want, the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity.
Unlike industrial age employment, digital production can be done from the home independently, even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations.
We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate, and inspire one another, all through bits instead of stuff, and we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff for the yeah,
we should do make games for each other, write books for each other, solve solve problems for each other, educate and inspire one another instead of doing stuff.
And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff, but well, nobody's going to have any money if they don't have any, I don't know, again, Douglas Rushkoff, sort of embarrassed this guy shares letters of my name.
You know, this Rushkoff guy needs to hear the story of the first Thanksgiving.
He needs to hear how his way failed.
He needs to actually, anyways, at CNN.com, and I just came in over the transom.
Fun and point, fun and fun and put him.
Look, I'm not going to make the claim that this guy's out there trying to help Obama.
But on the day Obama is giving his big job speech, this guy's got a piece out there.
America's productive enough that could probably shelter, feed, educate, even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
We're putting that theory to test here, folks.
We are in the process of doing exactly that.
Okay, everybody's been asking me, ladies and gentlemen, about the winners last week in the giant two if-by-tea contest.
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And two of those 10, as promised, are also going to win a select comfort sleep number bed.
Catherine and I are going to be calling the winners in the near future.
We haven't called you yet.
It doesn't mean you didn't win if you haven't gotten a call because we haven't called anybody yet.
We'll do it relatively soon.
We're all ready because of the overwhelming volume.
This was a record.
This ended up being a record everything.
And due to the overwhelming popularity of this, we're going to be putting together another very, very special promotion in the upcoming weeks.
So stay tuned for that.
If you think this one's good, wait for the next one.
Now, the 10-year anniversary, September 11th, is coming up Sunday.
And we're not going to be on the air, obviously, on Sunday.
In fact, I'm not going to be here tomorrow, folks.
We've got Mark Stein here tomorrow, as I must be elsewhere.
But this is, you know, we sponsor the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation at 2IF by T.
They are our great friends.
The Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation provides college scholarships for the children of Marines killed in action.
And we're very proud that we sponsor the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, a fantastic group of people that provide true assistance to the children of heroes that were lost trying to defend and serve our great country.
9-11 coming up, and it's 10 years has gone by.
Sometimes it seems that 10 years has zipped by.
Other times it seems like it's crept by.
But we know people, I'm sure you do, who have lost, or you have met, if you didn't at the time, people who lost loved ones during that attack.
And during the ensuing years, the intensity of that day has, of course, dwindled.
People have worked very hard to try to keep people focused on that day and what it meant and how we still face the same threat each and every day of this country.
And men and women who wear the uniform of the United States military are on the front lines every day, outposts all over the world and domestically, doing work that nobody knows about, can't be told about in large part to protect this country.
And we at 2FIT, when we started this little concern, wanted to make sure that we took some of what we made with this and partnered and sponsored an organization that helps these people.
So we've done that.
And you have been extremely valuable in that assistance being possible with your purchases of the best iced tea out there, 2FIT, 2FIT.com.
By the way, we do have, we have a Twitter.
We have a Twitter page.
2FIT has a Twitter page.
Yes, we do.
Yes, we do.
And you can follow 2FIT by Twitter.
Keep track of upcoming promotions and other things.
It's PoundSign 2FIT.
I don't do anything there.
Don't misunderstand.
I reserve everything for you here on this program.
But the gang at 2FIT, they play around.
We post some pictures there.
And no, I'm not going to be tweeting.
The pressure's on, by the way, for me to be tweeting.
But I'm.
My brother tweets.
My brother David has become a prolific tweeter.
And he tells me that he tells me all the stuff that happens on Twitter.
He loves it.
He enjoys it.
And says that the pressure's on out there for me.
Start tweeting.
This is so far I have resisted.
Look at how long it took us to get a Facebook page up.
But now we have surpassed a million friends out there.
So anyway, we will be calling, Catherine and I will be calling the 10 winners of last week's Super Duper promotion, and we're working on the next one.
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San Jose Mercury News reporting that agents from the FBI have raided the offices of Solyndra.
The now bankrupt solar energy company that the Obama regime helped secure $500 million in federally backed loans.
The FBI reportedly serving a search warrant on behalf of the Department of Energy, which ran the green jobs program that provided Solyndra with the loans.
President Obama and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu both visited the company's headquarters to highlight the green jobs company, country.
Everything's under seal, said the FBI spokeswoman.
The regime's relationship with the company has come under scrutiny since the bankruptcy was abruptly announced last week.
Daily Caller reported that between March 12, 2009 and April 14, 2011, Solyndra officials and investors made no fewer than 20 trips to the West Wing.
Why not just say the Oval Office?
That's where the Oval Office is, is in the West Wing.
So the feds are raiding Solyndra.
And as Snerdley's instincts asked, is there a cover-up underway here?
Fast and Furious is being covered up.
Fast and Furious being covered up big time.
And now this, the search warrant served on behalf of the Department of Energy.
Folks, there are red flags everywhere on this.
There was no business there.
I told you there's no business here.
And we've got $500 million that went to this outfit so Obama could go up there and champion green energy.
And what have we got a piece here in the stack from Investors Business Daily?
I believe it is about Fast and Furious.
Yes.
And it's entitled A White House Gun Runner.
The law.
Operation Gunwalker, the rogue ATF operation to arm Mexico's cartels, extends now to three White House officials.
A bell goes off with the one named Dan Restrepo.
Late last Friday, CBS News of the Los Angeles Times almost buried the news that Restrepo, the National Security Council's top man for Latin America, and two other officials were in on ATF memos from the Gunwalker operation called Fast and Furious.
That blows apart.
White House claims that it had no idea that ATF was encouraging front men for Mexico's cartels to buy weapons from U.S. gun dealers to trace them afterwards.
Some 2,000 U.S. guns were sold in Gunwalker, but they just disappeared until they turned up at massacres in Mexico and at the murder scenes of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and immigrations and customs enforcement agent Jaime Zapata.
But outgoing ATF acting director Ken Melson and others who've been the fall guys in this scandal darkly hint that their orders came from the White House.
Domestic critics think that Gunwalker can only be explained as a White House bid to boost support for gun control.
Restrepo's involvement distinctly raises both possibilities.
I'm sorry.
There's no question that's what this was about.
There's no question that the whole point of this was to get American-made guns and sold guns, guns really sold in America in the hands of Mexican drug cartels, used in massacres, and then discovered as a means for Obama to get back to the Second Amendment since there is no public mood for gun control.
And yet the regime and the American left want guns taken away from people.
In my mind, there's no question that's what this was about.
Anyway, back to the phones.
Greg and Lew, great to have you on the program, sir.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi, Russ.
It's good to talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
When you made the comment earlier about the Democrats getting tired of Obama blaming Congress, it took me back a few decades to Jimmy Carter and Teddy Kennedy.
Made me wonder, what do you think it would take to get a primary challenge going against this guy?
Too late.
Well, you know, no incumbent president has ever been re-elected when there's been a primary challenge, even though they squashed the primary opponent.
And it never happened.
You wonder if the poll numbers go too low or maybe some of these scandals you're just talking about now were to come together, if something could happen that maybe even a flake like Kucinich or maybe a serious person like Hillary would consider it if the numbers drop low enough.
Well, I think you heard Cheney has asked Hillary to run against Obama.
Honestly.
Vice President Cheney has asked Hillary, has suggested that Hillary run against Obama.
Of course, the Democrats are furious over this, that Cheney is inserting himself.
And so Cheney joins me essentially in Operation Chaos, which was, of course, to promote Hillary.
You know, I don't think, Greg, I don't think there's a Democrat out there that wants to be the one to make the first black president a failure.
I don't think, let's put it this way.
If Obama were white, there would be countless primary challenges against him.
He's destroying in the real world, in the real world, folks, he is destroying not just the country, but the Democrat Party.
Would you look at what happened in the 2010 elections?
And it was all the way down the ballot to state and local races, not just in the U.S. Congress.
Obama's destroyed.
But he's protected by his race.
Nobody, no white person in the Democrat Party wants that baggage.
Well, I don't think it's going to happen primarily because of that.
Audio sound by David Rodham Gergen last night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 211.
After the debate, Anderson Cooper said, what do you think of Rick Perry in this debate, Mr. Gergen?
Intellectually, Mitt Romney got the better of him.
He was more articulate on many occasions.
But Governor Perry brings a muscularity to the debate that I think will appeal to an awful lot of voters.
There's sort of a decisive quality about him that I don't think you see so much, and he doesn't back down easily.
I can certainly understand why he appeals to a lot of voters and why he's going to, this is going to be a very, very interesting race.
I thought he was calm and confident for a candidate who hasn't debated in five years.
Muscular brought some muscularity to the debate.
Now, what does that mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got onions.
It also means that Gergen's big on muscles.
You know, he was a big Hillary fan, but he's, you know, he's right here.
This is muscular toughness.
Not backing down.
That's exactly right.
Last night on CNN's Piers Morgan and I spoke with Thomas Lupe Friedman about Governor Perry and climate change.
Piers Morgan said, what do you hear of a guy who is streets ahead at the moment in a Republican nomination race just dismissing global warming as politicized nonsense?
What do you think of that?
What's really doubly absurd about it, Rick Perry's state is on fire, okay?
It's now experiencing the worst, tragically, the worst wildfires in its history, which fits in exactly with the predictions of climate change, that the hots will get hotter, the droughts will get longer, the wets will get wetter.
You get these extremes in temperature.
It's actually happening under his nose, climate change, and he's out denying it.
You know, so Texas has never been hot before.
It's never been dry before.
Never had fires before.
What's happening in Texas is not, I mean, it may be part of yesterday's climate change prediction, but it wasn't part of last year's.
And it wasn't part of the global warming prediction in 1985.
Most of these fires seem to be arson in Texas.
So global warming.
I want to know, Mr. Friedman, what global warming scientists predicted more arson as a result of rising temperatures?
Same program, same host, same guest.
Next question.
I think what everybody's crying out for is proper leadership.
And this is where I take issue with President Obama.
And I'm not even an American, which is why CNN hired me.
But I feel strongly that I want the president to stand up and be the boss.
I think a lot of people feel today, you kind of do a Rorschach test for the American people, you know, hold up a picture of the president and say, what comes to mind?
For a lot of people, it's just something fuzzy.
It's something not clear.
He's not in focus.
And he needs to get in focus with what he believes, what he's really ready to fight for.
Thomas Lupe Friedman, who was part of the media cabal that presented us with this image of Obama as a Messiah, is now saying he's fuzzy.
Nobody knows who he is.
He doesn't know what he believes even.
Not even Obama knows what he believes.
How can anybody else know what he believes when Obama himself doesn't know what he believes?
And yet, and yet, whatever he says to that on jobs is going to be gospel.
And I think he's going to, I think I'm being told here that he's going to request $43 million more for wind energy green jobs.
Here's Solyndra shutting down bankruptcy, being raided by the Fibies.
And Obama's going to call for $43 million more for wind energy green jobs in this speech tonight.
By the way, as far as warming is concerned, the Earth has been warming since the ice age.
Hasn't it?
Otherwise, we'd still be in the ice age.
True?
Simple logic, correct?
Has anybody ever explained the ice age?
The disappearance of the ice age?
The occurrence of the mini-ice agents disappear.
What happened?
Why?
What happened to it?
Well, it happened when Rick Perry got elected.
What happened?
I have just been told that Trumka is going to be one of Obama's guests tonight, Richard Trumka.
Now, I don't know if you know this or not.
500 AFL CIO longshoremen have gone on strike out in Seattle at a port.
Have you ever heard about this?
And they have taken six guards hostage.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen.
Here's by the Seattle Times and the AAP, at least 500 longshoremen stormed the port of Longview about 4.30 this morning.
They broke out windows in the guard shack as longshoremen wielding baseball bats and crowbars held six guards hostage.
Others cut brake lines on boxcars and dumped green, according to Longview Police Chief Jim Douche.
Work is at a standstill at the ports in Seattle and Everett as a labor dispute that started this morning turned violent.
And so the head of the AFL-CIO, whose thugs took six hostages, is going to be Obama's guest tonight.
I don't know if the guards are Tea Party members.
Well, they're clearly sons of bitches and they're going down.
I mean, it's clear they took these sons of bitches out, these guards.
Jimmy Hoff is out there having a party.
Here's Trumka, who runs this union.
He's going to be Obama's, because Obama's probably going to tout unions out there tonight in his speech.
And yeah, I will not condone this incendiary act that's undertaken by Trumka's people.
That's time for the motto.
That's right, resist we much.
And a quick timeout here.
I'll get around one phone.
One phone call when we come back.
Don't go away.
This is the same union, by the way, that went on strike in May of 2008 to protest the war in Iraq.
And they are AFL-CIO.
Here's Sean in Topeka.
Nice to have you on the show.
How you doing?
Good.
Thank you.
Hey, I've got a question.
Ask the question.
Why does the government have to be the equity investors for all these green jobs?
I don't remember studying that anywhere in any of my NBA classes.
Well, they don't have to be.
The government can choose to subsidize whatever it wants to subsidize.
In the case of Barack Obama, you have a committed leftist who is engaging.
Why don't you think it's Jeffrey Maltz who's supposed to be creating all these jobs that doesn't have to pay any taxes?
Well, your suspicions are right.
In fact, he's not creating all these.
GE is firing people.
They're creating them elsewhere, though.
No, GE's payrolls, it's down.
They've laid people off.
Look, the answer to this question is you have a committed leftist here who is attempting to upend the traditions and institutions that have made this country great, who has been made to believe or believes it himself that there really is such a thing as replaceable green clean energy for fossil fuels.
For whatever convoluted, cockamame, insane reason, he believes it.
Or, if he doesn't believe it, it's just a way of funneling money to campaign donors and friends, crony capitalism or what have you.
Bottom line is, there's no business there.
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