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Jan. 23, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:34
January 23, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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The views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right 99.7% of the time.
I don't think I've seen this kind of reaction to a national anthem since Roseanne Barr botched it in San Diego before a San Diego Padres game.
Stephen Tyler, the well-known Aerosmith frontman, sang a song some said was the national anthem prior to the AFC championship.
By the way, the AFC championship game is the highest rated in 18 years.
Yesterday of the Patriots hosting the Ravens.
The NFC game, the Giants and the Fortiners, was the highest rated NFC championship game in 17 years.
Anyway, everybody's been complaining of Stephen Tyler and his rendition of the national anthem.
Come on.
Does anybody did he even know where he was?
The guy's a good right-winger.
You know, we got to cut him some slack here.
And he was up there in Mr. Kraft's box.
I mean, you don't just get into Mr. Kraft's box being a reprobate.
So anyway, I know he screeched it, and I know he missed a couple words, and he missed, but come on, folks, it's our culture.
He tried.
He really tried.
I mean, he put a great effort.
If it was a national TV, man, a guy had to be nervous.
He can't help the way he sings.
Come on.
Compassion.
Where is it?
Snerdley says he feels sorry for the Ravens.
I can understand that.
I mean, your quarterback outplays the Patriots quarterback for the most part.
They're snake-bit.
The Ravens are snake-bit in AFC championship games with their wide receivers.
It was TJ Hushmanzada.
Same thing happened two years ago in Pittsburgh, or was it three or four years ago?
The last time they played the championship game in Pittsburgh.
The Ravens are on the march, same situation, trying to get down, tie it with a field goal.
And Hush Manzada dropped a breadbasket pass on the sideline on fourth down, and that was it.
And this guy, Lee Evans, they went and got him from Buffalo just for this reason.
No, not to miss pat, to catch him.
To replace T.J. Hushmanzada.
Anyway, I got half of it right.
I thought it'd be the Patriots and the Fortiners.
But now it's get ready two weeks of storyline of repeat.
TV is so bad you even got to rerun the Super Bowl.
For four years ago.
Super Bowl rerun.
Okay.
Ladies and gentlemen, fascinating piece here from ZeroHedge.com.
As I read it to you, tonight's stunning financial piece d'érés comes from Wyatt Emmerich of the Cleveland Current in what is sure to inspire some serious ire among all those who once believed Ronald Reagan that it was the USSR that was the evil empire.
Wyatt Emmerich analyzes disposable income and economic benefits among several key income classes.
He comes to the stunning and verifiable conclusion that a one-parent family of three making the minimum wage $14,500 a year has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.
Stop and think of that.
A one-parent family of three making $14.5 has more disposable income.
Take-home pay for those of you in Rio Linda than a family making $60,000 a year.
That excludes benefits from supplemental social security income disability checks.
America is now a country which punishes those middle-class people who not only try to work hard, but avoid scamming the system.
Not surprisingly, it's not only the richest and most audacious thieves that prosper, it's also the penny scammers at the very bottom of the economic ladder that rip off the middle class each and every day, courtesy of the world's most generous entitlement system.
And then they have the chart here from Emmerich where he worked all of this out.
Self-explanatory chart.
It's much too many numbers here for me to share with you on the radio.
I'll tell Coco about this.
I'll send him this.
Coco, just find it yourself.
You're good at Zero Hedge.
And the headline, in Entitlement America, the head of a household of four making a minimum wage has more disposable income than a family making $60,000.
And here's a pull quote from the story.
We have been writing for over a year how the very top of America's social order steals from the middle class each and every day.
Now we find out the very bottom of the entitlement food chain also makes out like a bandit compared to that idiot American who actually works and pays his taxes.
And folks, here again, I hadn't intended to do this, but this article's from November of last year, by the way.
And I'm told we did it back then.
I don't remember.
But at any rate, this ties into what I was talking about in the first hour.
The people who make this country play by the rules, they try.
Nobody ever succeeds.
I'm not trying to make these people the sole virtuous people in the country, but they try.
They try to play by the rules.
They try to live the best they can, morality, keep their kids in school and all the right things.
And they are the brunt of the jokes.
They're the focus of evil.
They're the blame.
They're the racists, the sexists, the bigots, the homophobes.
They're sick of it.
They are paying the salaries of all these public sector union people.
They're paying the pensions of all these public union people.
They're paying the salaries.
They're paying the health care.
They're paying these people twice what they earn.
And now they're going to find out that somebody on minimum wage has more take-home pay than they do.
That's the big bite that's coming out of them.
And it's just, it is atrocious.
And whether they know it consciously or just indirectly, they're very much aware that this system is all out of whack.
That they are not the problem.
They are portrayed as the problem.
They're selfish.
They're greedy because they don't want a tax increase.
They don't like seeing their kids' futures being spent away into oblivion and the resulting future tax rates to pay for it that they know their kids are going to have to pay.
Coco, I take it back.
The piece was from 2010.
So it's a year and a half old.
Anyway, I just stumbled across it, and I'm sure it's probably in a year and a half of Obama.
It's even worse statistically than this is, but it is all laid out here.
New York Times over the weekend had a story about why Apple's products are assembled in China.
Why aren't they made in America?
Apple has something like 43,000 employees in America, not counting the store employees, counting the retail employees, 43,000 employees at their headquarters in Cupertino.
And it's a long piece.
It prints out to 14 pages.
And it recounts the fact that Jobs once had dinner with all these high-tech guys out in California, Jobs and Zuckerberg and so forth.
And that dinner, Jobs told Obama, these jobs are never coming back, Mr. President.
And we don't understand why you say that nothing can be done about this.
This is the greatest country on earth.
These particular jobs, the way we do it, the flexibility we need cannot happen in the United States.
And this New York Times story spells it out.
As I said, leave out one crucial factor here, and that's unions to help explain why manufacturing in America can't compete with the way the ChiComs do it.
Let me give you a fascinating statistic that will put this in perspective.
The primary manufacturing company for Apple's products is called Foxconn.
Hanhai precision manufacturer.
And they make electronic gadgets for practically everybody.
Apple is one of their largest customers.
They have at one factory, 230,000 employees.
One factory, 230,000 employees.
Most of them live in dormitories on the site of the factory.
There's a hospital.
There are kitchens.
This place goes through.
I wish I could remember something like the tonnage of pork and rice every month this place goes through to feed its employees is astounding.
230,000 employees in one factory.
They work six days a week, 12 hours a day.
They earn the equivalent of 17 US dollars a day.
And they are plum jobs in China.
They could fill 3,000 new jobs a day based on applications.
By contrast, there are 50 U.S. cities with 230,000 people.
Adults.
There are 83 U.S. cities with a total population of 230,000.
There are 50 U.S. cities with an adult population of over 230,000.
Here is a factory, and that's just one of Foxconn's factories.
Now, one example is cited of what can be done in China that can't happen in America.
They also talk about they were able to fill 8,700 engineer opening, engineering job, not assembly line workers, but engineering jobs in 15 days.
It is said in the story, it would take a U.S. company with all the legal hurdles and everything nine months to find that many.
Now, let's go to the iPhone.
Something like two months before the iPhone was to be, it had been announced, the release date had been announced.
Everybody couldn't wait for the iPhone.
And Steve Jobs discovered a huge flaw.
He had the phone in his pocket with his keys.
And after a while, the glass or the plastic that was the screen got scratched repeatedly because of his keys.
He pulled it out of his pocket.
He showed his design team, I'm not taking this to market.
I don't care.
If you can't fix this in five weeks or four weeks, we're pushing back the release date.
Can't do it.
You get it done.
I want a new screen.
I want a non-scratchable screen on this phone in six weeks.
The first thing Jobs did, he had heard about something that Corning had invented called Gorilla Glass.
So he went to the Corning CEO.
The Corning CEO, oh, yeah, we've got Gorilla Glass.
That's 30-year-old technology.
We don't make it.
We're not geared up for it.
Jobs said, don't be afraid.
You can do it.
Guerrilla Glass came into existence.
The Corning people did it.
The ChiComs at Foxconn were able in six weeks to redesign and remanufacture millions of iPhones with this new screen that had been demanded six weeks prior.
The environmental studies necessary for this kind of change would have taken years in America, plus the other obstacles.
There simply isn't and never has been a factory in this country that could produce, they're going to produce something 50 million iPads this year.
The number of iPhones is almost twice that.
They sell these things worldwide.
A factory of 200, and that's just one of 230,000 employees.
60,000 of these people live and work at the factory.
Many of the people at Foxconn City work six days a week, 12 hours a day.
They earn $17 per day.
May sound inhumane by American standards.
These jobs are in high demand in China, so much so that Jennifer Rigoni, former worldwide supply manager for Apple, told the New York Times that Foxconn could hire 3,000 people overnight.
That's how many people want to work there.
Those are just a couple of examples of how the scale, speed, and efficiency.
There's another aspect of it.
All of the parts that go into an iPhone are made within 25 miles of the factory that assembles them.
So if Apple wanted to, they'd have to ship all the parts either by air or by boat across the Pacific Ocean here.
It makes no economic sense to do it any other way than they're doing it.
And they got hold of some Apple executives for the story.
And one Apple executive who's not identified said, we sell iPhones in over 100 countries.
We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems.
Our only obligation is making the best product possible.
And we found out how to do it.
And we found how to do it the cheapest and most efficient way.
And it really, it's a fascinating piece.
The one thing that is not mentioned in this whole story is unions.
Of course, there aren't any in China.
You couldn't get any of this done in modern day America.
So all the clamor for manufacturing jobs and why evil American companies leave the systems, the ecosystems, the supply sane, supply chain, it just doesn't exist.
Nor does the labor price, obviously.
But it is a fascinating thing.
World War II, we used to do it, yeah.
World War II, we used to.
We built the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, the Empire State Building in the same five years.
You know that?
In the Depression.
In the Depression, in the 30s.
I know that's right.
What we did in World War II, the world has never seen in terms of manufacturing.
Output of major, big, large.
There's no question of it.
Here it is.
The Foxconn Central Kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day to feed these people.
Three tons of pork, 13 tons of rice a day.
This factory's in Shenzhen, by the way, but there are Foxconn factories all over the place.
What U.S. company could find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?
To work 12 hours a day, six days a week?
Here's another thing.
Apple's executives estimated about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly line workers building the iPhone.
You need some engineers watching this.
The company's analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the U.S.
And China took them 15 days.
And that's how they were able to get the iPhone out on time.
Now, look, I know.
Some of you were shouting at the radio.
I know they had a problem in 2010.
A number of Foxconn employees committed suicide at work to protest poor working conditions and low pay.
It's not a panacea.
I don't mean to say that that's nirvana over there.
In fact, after the suicides, managers at the Foxconn factories ordered staff to sign pledges that they wouldn't commit suicide anymore.
No, they did.
And then they say, if you do commit suicide, your families will only seek the legal minimum in damage.
They had to sign that.
Promise you won't commit suicide.
And if you do, get the legal minimum and that's it.
Made them sign that.
Now, the point of this is this just wouldn't, it couldn't happen here.
iPhones aren't made in America because they can't be.
The infrastructure, the labor force doesn't exist at the levels necessary to support Apple's operations or the demand.
Just can't happen.
Not the way things are currently structured in America.
Just these circumstances I describe, 230,000 people living at the factory.
Well, 60,000 living at the factory and the other, within a block, not going to happen here.
Hence, jobs Americans won't do it.
It's just what it is.
Hi, welcome back, folks.
Great to have you here, El Rushbow, behind the Golden EIB microphone.
Where is it?
I wanted to, look, there's a story I had here on Cylindra.
Maybe I can do this from memory.
Cylindra is, here it is.
I wanted to make a point about private entrepreneurism, capitalism, and so forth.
By the way, that Apple story, that iPhone story in the New York Times, that is an attempt by the New York Times.
That's an attack on Apple.
I want you to understand.
I should have said that at the outset.
That 14-page story is an attack on Apple.
Let me give you a quote from early in the piece by a guy named Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic advisor to the White House.
He said, Apple is an example of why it's so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now.
If that's the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.
Apple's an example why we can't create middle-class jobs.
So here's Steve Jobs, Apple, big Obama supporter.
Here comes the regime going after Apple for not making iPhones in America.
Gets the New York Times on the case.
But I wanted to give you an example here of the difference in private sector and public sector.
We get questions all the time.
Rush, why can't we get to it by tea in the stores?
Well, there are two reasons.
One of the reasons is something that I learned when I had my two books out.
Once they hit the store, you lose control of the product.
In the case of my books, they ended up in the cooking section, the prostitution section.
People, the liberal clerks that worked there hid them, refused to put them on.
So I've told people that came in to buy them, sorry, we don't carry it or put the cover out, the back cover out so nobody could find it.
You just lose control of the product in a highly charged political world in which I live.
That's number one thing.
We like having the direct contact with everybody that buys 2F by T on the internet.
We have direct customer service contact with them and so forth.
Once you go retail, that's a whole different approach.
But there's another reason that has to do with money.
To go retail means startup costs to produce enough of the product in all of the flavors now to cover the country.
If you go retail, it better be in the store where people want to go back.
Now, you can't be in every store, but it's got to be in enough.
The cost to bottle that large an inventory, that's a decision that we have to make.
We're in the process of doing just that.
But government doesn't have to do that.
They don't have to worry about anything.
It'll look at Solyndra, unlimited money, just throw money and throw money at Solyndra.
It doesn't matter if it works or not.
It's crony capitalism.
They don't have near the same concerns.
And the Solyndra story is from CBS San Francisco.
After filing for bankruptcy last year, Fremont solar company Solyndra still owes American taxpayers half a billion dollars, but Channel 5 San Francisco caught them destroying millions of dollars worth of parts.
At Soly's complex in Fremont, workers in white jumpsuits were unwrapping brand new glass tubes used in solar panels last week.
They're the latest, most cutting-edge solar technology, and they're being thrown into dumpsters.
Forklifts brought one pallet after another piled high with the carefully packaged glass, slowly but surely, and all ended up shattered.
And it's not a few loads.
Hundreds of thousands of tubes on shrink-wrapped pallets will meet similar fate.
They paid $2 million for this.
The CBS 5 crew found one piece lying in a parking lot.
Solyndra still owes the German company that made the tubes close to $8 million, and they're throwing the stuff away with the imprimatur of Obama, with the approval of Obama.
Just throw it away.
It doesn't matter, even though they owe the money.
They're in bankruptcy.
They've got to pay things back.
They're throwing the stuff away.
Nothing like that could happen in the private sector.
Nothing at all like that could happen.
It's just striking out there.
This also, this story is from the UK Daily Mail.
Now, what's funny to me is the last line.
Here's the headline of the story.
Men over six feet face a 24% lower risk of heart failure.
This is another one of these bogus health stories.
They can't prove this.
This is absolutely, it's just nothing more than fear-mongering.
All these health stories.
But I want to read to you the last paragraph to tell you what the UK Daily Mail thinks of its readers.
Ready?
Heart failure affects around 900,000 people in Britain, mainly the elderly.
Duh.
It occurs.
Heart failure occurs.
Snerdley, are you listening?
I want everybody to know when heart failure happens.
Heart failure occurs when your heart is too weak to properly pump blood around the body.
And that can be caused by heart attacks, which also cause the heart to weaken.
Did you know that?
Did you know you could die from this?
A heart attack will make your heart too weak to properly pump blood.
And that can then cause the organ to weaken after the heart attack.
Do you know that your heart gets really weak after a heart attack?
It's right here in the UK Daily Mail.
And men over six feet have a 24% lower risk.
So what do you bet stretching machines in the UK are going to be the next entrepreneurial fad?
Going, are we guaranteed to stretch you three inches?
So what's the lesson here?
Get taller.
How frankly absurd.
Here's back to vote.
Charleston, South Carolina.
This is Carol, and I'm glad you waited.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Oh, Rush.
I love you.
My heart is beating so hard I can barely speak.
I've always wanted to meet you.
The heck with the iPads.
If you gave me an iPad, I would be like, no, I would want to meet you more than anything in the whole world.
Here's it back if I could just meet you.
It may happen.
You never know.
Oh, my dream.
I have friends in Charleston, South Carolina.
I may be there someday.
Oh, Rush, you have no idea what a pleasure this is.
But I know you guys are pressed for time, but I'll be quick.
I, unlike some of your callers, agree with you 100% of the time.
And I thank my husband, Mark, for turning me on to you 13 years ago.
I voted for Santorum, and I was feeling so deflated Saturday because I knew that the people here in South Carolina were listening to the media that Romney and Newt were the only ones who could beat Obama.
I am Catholic, and I went to church Saturday night.
To my surprise, there was Rick Santorum and his family attending mass.
They were so genuine and kind, and I conveyed to them how upset I was that the media has ignored him, and he agreed and gave me a big hug.
I feel like he is the true conservative.
I am from Pennsylvania, and they are rooting for him up there because they know that he truly lives and breathes conservatism through his whole life.
I am so disappointed that these South Carolinians are being snowed by the media.
And I fear for my one-year-old and two and a half-year-olds, and I feel like, and maybe it's a conspiracy theory, but if Obama wins in November, that this country will fall into communism.
And maybe it's being too fearful, but I'm just not, I can't expect anything.
You know, with the, through example.
Well, have you, you ought to get my buddy Mark Levin's book, Ameritopia.
His point is we already have.
Absolutely.
We're already being governed outside.
This is a post-constitutional country.
Oh, my God.
Yes.
But what I wanted to ask was two questions.
What advice could you give Rick Santorum to get his polls up in Florida?
And also, what happened with Goldwater?
Because I wasn't alive back then.
And what specifics were there about that?
Well, conservatism was brand new back then.
You were dealing with popular Lyndon Johnson coming off a martyred president's death, JFK.
Conservatism was just, it was totally brand new.
I remember the media in those days.
Goldwater would say things like, he'd rip the East Coast, the mindset of the Eastern Seaboard.
So LBJ ran a commercial that was a floating wooden block of the country with a saw, sawing off the Eastern Seaboard.
And the man in the ad said, Lyndon Johnson believes in the whole country.
And then there was the daisy ad.
Goldwater was going to blow us up with a nuclear, little girl picking daisies and a nuclear detonation.
The screen goes white as though there's a nuclear to countdown.
Mother Teresa would have lost in a landslide in 64.
Now, I'm reticent to get advice what Santorum could do.
I look at, geez, you put me in the, you asked and I was.
I've been dreaming of what could be, who would be your favorite because I know that I would follow you.
I would follow you to Helen Back.
Here's what I would do.
I would stop talking about myself.
I stopped saying I did this and I did that and this is what I did and those guys aren't this and those guys aren't that.
I'd just start articulating conservatism.
I would just make it, I'd make it the fundamental premise of every message of mine.
Now, you got to mention the other guys at some point.
If you want to highlight the fact that they're not conservative, fine, but I wouldn't make that the primary.
You can portray yourself as the only genuine conservative by actually doing it, not saying it.
It's probably a fine line here.
But Santorum is who he is.
That's why I'm reticent to give people advice because people are going to be who they are.
And he's got his people telling him the best way to go about this.
But you're the true conservative, and hopefully he would listen to you.
No, I don't know.
I don't know.
He's out like he's making fun of Newt's grandiosity.
I'd be grandiose.
I'd try to be larger than life.
Not in a phony way.
But look, I feel very uncomfortable because I like Santorum a whole lot.
And he is a real deal.
And he is one of the most solid individuals that I know.
And I at a loss to explain why anybody catches fire.
I don't think Newt is really catching fire.
I know this is a fine, fine point.
Newt is catching fire, but Newt's message is what Newt is a vessel.
Newt is allowing people by voting for him to tell the establishment what they think of the way they've been running this party.
And it's some might think that's a distinction that's too smart by half.
But what advice would I give Obama to do what?
To win again?
What advice would I give Obama to win?
Oh, come on.
Well, I'd have to think about that because I don't think he can.
In a real world, now he clearly can.
I don't want to mislead anybody here.
Look, there's something else here, Carol.
And again, it's a surface thing.
You know how people are fed up with the Republicans having dumb people who can't talk.
And Newt sounds smart, and he can spout things from history that roll off his tongue.
He comes off as smart.
And I can't tell you how much that matters to people on our side.
They're sick and tired of people being nominated who can't put two sentences together or sound like cowboy Billy Bob at the time they're doing it.
They just fed up with it.
And there's so many factors that go into all of that.
Right here, folks.
Nicotine stained, formerly nicotine stained fingers.
Newsmax, lead story.
Romney's campaign advisors are Charlie Crist's political aides.
According to Newsmax, the firm of Stevens and Schrieffer.
Consultant firm play the lead role in crafting Romney's primary and national campaign strategy.
They are Charlie Crist's advisors, Governor Florida.
They advised him to embrace Obama and campaign as a moderate.
According to Newsmax, that's whose Romney advisors are.
Just got it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will be out tomorrow.
We've got Mark Stein here tomorrow.
And I did not know that there was a Republican debate tonight, but I am sure that Stein will be here tomorrow to tell you how Newt blew it and whatever else.
And Romney was no better.
And we're all screwed.
And then I'll be here Wednesday.
We'll clean it all up and have fun and whatever.
So you have a just Stein's good.
No, no, I'm just having fun here.
Just have him.
What?
The Attorney State of the Unions tomorrow night.
That I wouldn't mind missing, but I'll watch it.
You know, maybe Romney could call in Bain to help with the campaign.
I mean, they're turnaround artists, turnaround specialists.
Just an idea.
And we'll think about the Santorum advice.
And remember, Mark Stein here tomorrow, which means Newt's in for it.
And I'll be back.
And everybody else.
I'll be back Wednesday.
We'll see you then.
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