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Feb. 1, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:35
February 1, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations on a daily basis.
Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a thrill and a delight to have you with us.
Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882.
And the email address, L. Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
Unemployment numbers are coming out tomorrow.
We will have some unemployment numbers coming out tomorrow.
And I want to give you a couple of reality checks here.
There will be two things that should happen that should be factored in.
And that will be the traditional loss of 40,000 temporary jobs, people that were hired during Christmas.
They theoretically been let go by now, so it'd be 40,000 people.
And then there's a little piece of information here from something called Larry Levin's Trading Advantage.
Larry Levin's a successful floor trader in the futures market, and he shows up on financial shows.
And he said in his little note to his clients, to his followers, he said, another important con will be revealed Friday and ignored to be sure, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the tortured yet government-approved employment figures.
January is the month that the Bureau of Labor Statistics fesses up to the prior year's lies of its employment statistics.
The birth death guesstimates get closer to reality by always and massively readjusting the prior year's employment data lower.
And gives examples.
Over the past five years, the adjustment in quotes has averaged minus 335,000.
That's how many jobs lost they didn't count during the course of the year that they make up for in this report coming out Friday.
For example, in January of 2011, they had to revise downward by 339,000 jobs.
In January of 2010, they had to revise downward by 427,000 jobs.
In January of 2009, they revised down or they had minus 356,000 jobs.
In January 2008, they had to revise downward by 378,000.
By January 2007, it was down minus 175,000.
So if they remain as honest as they have in the past, there will be a huge correction.
And what it is, is the birth death guesstimate get closer to reality by massively readjusting the prior year's employment data lower.
So for example, according here to Larry Levin, in January of 2011, we were told that we actually lost 339,000 more jobs in 2010 than add up if you add up all the months in 2010 individually, make an adjustment.
Similarly, January 2010, we were told that we lost 420,000 or 27,000 jobs in 2009, more than had been reported.
So that's a number that's coming Friday, as well as the 40,000 temporary jobs.
So, if the pattern holds, this guy is suggesting that the unemployment number that comes out Thursday and Friday could be pretty bad.
Now, back in January of 2011, one year ago, we were told via the AP, the department also revised its past employment estimates to show that job losses from the Great Recession have been much worse than previously stated.
The economy has shed 8.4 million jobs since the downturn began in December 2007, up from a previous figure of 7.2 million.
That's the most jobs lost in any recession as a percentage of total employment since World War II.
So that was the report that we got last year, a year ago, that Larry Levin is talking about coming out this week.
So again, just to make the point, the AP reported a year ago: quote, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised its past employment estimates to show that job losses of the Great Recession have been much worse than previously stated.
And the average worst, the average downward revision over the last five years has been $335,000.
That's been the average, and the high was minus $427,000 reported in January 2010, which would have been for year 2009.
So we shall see.
Just wanted to set you up for this.
And since it's election year, I want to see if this pattern somehow magically breaks.
And this standard operating procedure of being honest on the birth death guesstimate gets closer to reality again this year, or if they just punt and ignore it.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, in his speech, Obama was in false church today.
In his speech today, President Obama says the government's going to spend at least $10 billion refinancing everybody's mortgage without doing any credit checks.
Nobody's got to prove anything to anybody.
He also said, and I've got the sound bites coming up, he also said banks and lenders must be held accountable for ending the practices that helped cause this crisis in the first place.
So it's like we're back at 2009 and Obama has never been in office.
And we're back now to the subprime mortgage being the fault of the banks.
Predatory lending tricked people into taking out loans that they couldn't pay back.
The banks did that, don't you know?
These banks, they targeted these poor people and they targeted these minorities.
They went after, how smart is that?
If you run a bank and you want to trick people into borrowing money, you go trick people that can't pay you back.
How smart is that?
When that's one of your primary income streams, then you say, yeah, well, we're going to trick these people into taking out these loans.
And then what we're going to do is we're going to package these loans into some new product called a mortgage-backed security.
And then we're going to sell these things to whatever SAPs we can find.
We're going to have a whole new way of doing it.
Why would they do that if they weren't told to do it?
No, the number is 1.2 million lost jobs from year to year.
That's the year ago report.
They added 1.2 million jobs lost.
The AP story one year ago.
That's so one year ago would have been January 2011.
It would have been the report for 2010.
And what they were telling us was that 1.2 million jobs more were lost in 2010 than were reported during the year.
That's how dishonest all this is.
And it's hidden up in the birth death change guesstimates, as it's called.
We'll just see.
We'll just see what they do, given that it's an election year.
So, what is Obama going to do now?
Go trick these same people into refinancing their loans?
Is that what harp?
So, first, the people were tricked by the banks into taking out loans they couldn't afford.
Now, Obama's going to go trick them into refinancing these loans.
Is that what we're being asked to believe here?
That's exactly what we're being asked to believe.
When everybody who's paid a dime's worth of attention to this knows that the banks only did what they were told to do by the federal government, the Community Redevelopment Act, Reinvestment Act, whatever it's called, Janet Reno threatening these banks back in the 90s that if they didn't make these loans, that she would investigate them.
The banks were forced.
I'm not saying the banks are innocent, but what happened was they were forced to make loans to people who couldn't pay them back, and then they had to find a way to make the loans worth something.
So, they concocted a new product called a mortgage-backed security.
They pooled all these worthless mortgages together and prompted, look at this income stream.
We did a great analogy.
Let me paraphrase this great analogy.
Guy has a bar, and his customers are 25 alcoholics who are unemployed.
And they come in every day, and they buy booze, except they can't pay for it.
And a point comes where the bartender doesn't have any money to restock his bar.
So, he goes to some investors.
He says, Look at what I'm owed here.
Look at what these people are going to pay me down the road.
This is a hell of an investment.
So, a bunch of idiots give the bartender a bunch of money to reload his bar, and the same thing happens.
The alcoholics keep coming in, they don't have a job, they keep buying booze, but nobody ever gets paid.
Finally, the bartender can't get up, he can't get any more money.
That bar is sold on the basis.
Look at all the income that's going to come in here for you.
Look at all the money this guy's owed.
It's worthless, but they found somebody to invest in the bar.
Then they found somebody to buy the bar.
Then the guy who bought the bar finally realized, well, no income.
These people are unemployed.
They're alcoholics.
All they do is drink and they don't have any money.
I got a worthless investment here.
So, okay, how can I convince somebody else to buy this piece of crap?
And that's what happened until there weren't any more people to fool.
And these are the best and brightest.
These are the smartest.
This is exactly what happened.
And Obama wants to tell us that the guilty party, the guilty party, is the bartender who was selling predatory booze to people who couldn't afford it and making them buy it.
I'll have the Obama sound bites from this speech because it'll tick you off.
It's campaign season.
And this illustrates it, shows why, again, this guy has got to be the focus of the GOP campaign.
How are you?
Welcome back.
Half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.
I know a lot of you get upset and irritated with me when I talk about Apple.
So I'm going to talk about Apple.
I wonder how they feel at Apple about now.
When the App Store first hit the mobile app store, iOS App Store for the iPhone and the iPad, Apple made it clear that they were in bed with the New York Times, even in Apple's website ads, when they would show a display, a website display on one of their computer monitors.
It would always be the New York Times.
Steve Jobs, in the biography written by Walter Isaacson, I think in that biography said that he wanted to help the New York Times figure out how to do it right, i.e., digital New York Times.
It was clear that there was a quid pro quo symbiotic relationship.
That Jobs, then Apple, loved the New York Times.
The great newspaper wanted to help him do it better.
In the last three weeks, there have been two stories in the New York Times about how basically Apple is responsible for people dying in China putting together iPhones and iPads.
Sweat labor, child labor.
We've discussed one of the stories on this program.
What has happened as a result of those two stories is that the usual touchy feely student community has gotten up in arms and is demanding that Apple sign petitions saying that nobody will die in the assembly of iPhones.
They're demanding all kinds of concessions.
They're demanding that Apple be a better corporate citizen.
It's got to shock them because, I mean, their very own, in a political sense, their very own community coming after them.
And here's, after all of this showering and promotion of New York Times on everything Apple, here comes the New York Times out and a hit piece.
And the reason for it is to help Obama.
Yeah, they did wait till Steve Jobs died to have this reversal take place.
I don't know if there's a deep meaning to that, meaning that current management's not so in bed with the New York Times.
I don't know.
But still, it was a 180.
It's a stark difference.
All I wanted to tell you was: Apple's getting beat up because they don't make iPhones in the country in America.
And we've told you the stories.
The factories over there have 230,000 employees.
We've only got 50 American cities with adult population larger than 230,000.
But the Apple employees in these companies, Foxconn, 230,000 employees, 60,000 live at the factory.
The factory has a hospital, a bunch of restaurants.
They go through all this pork and rice feeding them every day.
They make the equivalent of 17 hours a day.
There was a story earlier this week that showed a picture of 3,000 Chinese at an application center hoping to get a job at one of these factories.
So anyway, I just think it's time for the truth to become to the only thing that happens with the iPhone in China is it's put together.
It's where it's assembled.
Apple does employ the brains behind the iPhone in this country.
The high-paying tech and engineering jobs responsible for the iPhone, the hardware design, the software, all of it happen here in America.
The high-paid jobs that are responsible for the existence of the iPhone take place here.
Those jobs are in America.
The assembly jobs are what take place in China.
It's not as though Apple is stiffing America.
The fact of the matter is that the best jobs, the high-quality, high-paying jobs regarding iPhone and iPad and all the other Apple products, the computers do take place and do exist in the United States.
And the New York Times has turned on them.
And of course, the usual suspects, the know-nothing social do-gooters get all up in arms about human rights abuses and Apple's killing people.
There was a story, they polished the back of the iPad, the aluminum case, they polish it, and the dust from the polishing is so fine can cause explosions.
And it did at one iPad factory, and 63 odd people got injured and so forth.
Well, that didn't sit well.
And so the usual do-gooder suspects are out.
I just thought it was worth knowing that they used to love each other at Apple and the New York Times, and that the quality, high-paying design tech jobs are in this country.
So there, here's Obama, Falls Church, Virginia, the James.
No, Apple hates me.
I'm not doing this for any reason other than I believe in the truth.
They despise me at Apple.
It's politicky.
It's political.
It's politics.
Anyway, the James Lee Community Center, Obama speaking about the economy and about helping responsible homeowners.
Millions of families who did the right and the responsible thing.
Folks who shopped for a home that they could afford, secured a mortgage, made their payments each month.
They were hurt badly by the irresponsible actions of other people who weren't playing by the same rules, weren't taking the same care, weren't acting as responsible.
Stop tape, stop tape, stop tape, stop tape.
Now, you think Obama's talking about people who took out loans that couldn't pay them?
He's comparing, okay, we got the people played by the rules.
These are people went out and they shopped for a home that they could afford and they secured a mortgage and they made their payments and they were hurt badly by the irresponsible actions of other people who weren't playing by the same rules.
So you're left to assume he's talking about people that went out and made irresponsible loans and didn't pay the money.
That's not who he's talking about, folks.
Nope.
He's talking about the banks.
He's talking about the lenders who sold the loans to people who knew they couldn't pay them back.
Listen to this lie.
By lenders who sold loans to people who they knew couldn't afford the mortgages.
And buyers who bought homes they knew they couldn't afford.
And banks that packaged those mortgages up and traded them to reap phantom profits knowing that they were building a house of cards.
It was wrong.
Yeah.
He's got it mostly right, except for the fact that these lenders were under federal orders to do this.
And as much as he wants to try to pretend that people don't know that, he's my guest.
He can go right ahead.
The fact is, with the passage of each day, more and more Americans understand and will understand that these lenders had a gum to their heads.
These banks had a gum to their heads.
And I want to stress again: I am not suggesting they're totally innocent, but they were at a crossroads.
They were forced with the point of a gun at their heads to make loans to people who would never pay them back.
All for social do-gooder reasons.
It's not fair that some people don't have a house.
We got to make sure that everybody has a house with the magic of affordable housing, as Marnie Frank would call it.
So they had this worthless paper.
They had to do something with it to try to recoup the value that they were forced to do without.
So that's when they packaged the stuff up.
And by the way, that's where Fannie and Freddie come in because Fannie and Freddie bankrolled all this worthless stuff.
And that's why they're still being bailed out.
And Fannie and Freddie are Obama's buddies.
So you never hear him put them in this equation.
It's just those evil banks.
And I'll tell you what this sets up.
Who in this analogy is the evil lender who sold loans to people who knew they couldn't afford the mortgages?
Mitt Romney.
Before long and before all is said and done, Mitt Romney's name is going to be in this speech in place of lenders.
Mitt Romney and vulture capitalists like him, Bain Capital, blah, blah, even though this is not what they did, Romney's name will get tossed in here along with all the other guilty capitalists.
Yeah, we had a caller last month, Snurdly, if you remember, a mortgage broker who told us how Fannie and Freddie cheated and how they'd show up at these trade shows and advise people how to set up no credit necessary mortgages.
It was such a scam here.
And here comes Obama to bring this back to life as it was in 2008 during the crisis.
It's the bank's fault.
That's what's happening here in the election year.
Here, listen to the one more thing about this Apple and Foxconn business.
Apple is not the only bunch that use them.
Foxconn makes things for Samsung.
They make things for Sharp, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo.
They make it all.
They assemble all this stuff.
Apple is the only one being targeted as a company engaging in child labor and killing its employees.
And why do you think that is?
Why do you think it?
Well, it's not just that they're a number one company.
These New York Times hit pieces on Apple to benefit Obama.
So the fact that they're number one, yeah, the number one capitalist outfit, heartless, cold calculus, that's a big part of it.
It's also because Jobs isn't there anymore.
They wouldn't dare do this with Jobs there, I guarantee you.
At any rate, Apple's an American success story, and that's why.
An American success story has to be torn apart for the leftist agenda to advance.
Apple must be shown to be heartless and corrupt.
It must be shown to be this giant, heartless behemoth that doesn't care for people at all.
There's even a book out now.
Some guy at Forbes has written a book, and I don't know if this is part of a hit piece on Apple, but it's got some interesting things in it about how secretive Apple is and how miserable its employees are, how horrible a place it is to work there.
Because nobody's trusted.
Nobody is allowed to talk about what they're doing.
Nobody's allowed to go to a different department and see what's happening there.
It's very secretive.
Nobody's allowed to talk about anything.
In fact, new hires are so distrusted, they are put on fake projects for six months just to see if they're talkers.
They are put on projects that have no barriers.
They don't exist.
Just to see how they behave.
Because the Apple culture is secrecy.
That's how they keep a leg up on their competition.
It's mean, Snerdley.
Don't you understand?
It's mean.
It's mistreating people.
They're heartless and cold and brutal.
This is exactly what capitalism is, Snerdley.
Don't you understand?
Exactly.
And that's why it must not be allowed to happen.
That's what's happening here.
One more soundbite, and maybe two.
I'm going to get to the phones here, El Quicko.
This is more of Obama in Falls Church, Virginia.
Here's what he's going to do now about these predatory lenders who forced people to take out loans they couldn't pay back.
I am sending Congress a plan that will give every responsible homeowner in America the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage by refinancing at historically low rates.
No more red tape.
No more runaround from the banks.
And a small fee on the largest financial institutions will make sure it doesn't add to our deficit.
You'll be able to refinance at a lower rate.
You'll be able to save hundreds of dollars a month that you can put back in your pocket.
Or you can choose those savings to rebuild equity in your homes, which will help most underwater homeowners come back up for air more quickly.
Come back up for air for more quickly.
I'm sending Congress a plan that will give every responsible homeowner a chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage by refinancing at historically low rates.
Thank you, Federal Reserve.
No more red tape, no more runaround from the banks.
A small fee on the largest financial institutions, make sure it doesn't add to the deficit.
We're talking chump change here, just like raising taxes.
More add to the deficit.
So again, it's all the banks' fault.
You're going to be able to refinance with no proof, no credit proof, no nothing.
No more red tape.
Now, this has been tried.
This is HAARP 3.
I don't know what HARP stands for, but that's the acronym.
And the two previous mortgage assistance programs have failed.
Despite how easy Obama makes it sound, it ended up being a nightmare once people got into the labyrinth of the bureaucracy that's been set up.
That's what's happened in the two previous plans.
People found out what it took, how complicated it was, and they said, hell with it.
So these new fees, they can put, let's see here, a small fee on the largest financial institutions to make sure it doesn't endorse.
Say hello, folks, to an increase in your ATM fee.
The bank's going to get, if Obama slaps a tax on them, they're going to pass it on to you somewhere.
It's going to cost more to use your ATM.
There's going to be a higher interest rate on your credit.
Something's going to happen.
This is what Obama and the boys never understand.
It's not a static economy.
One more bite, and here's this.
This is what happens if you're a bank and you don't follow orders.
I asked my attorney general to establish, to investigate the kind of activity banks took when they packaged and sold risky mortgages.
And that task force is ramping up its work as we speak.
We're going to keep at it and hold people who broke the law accountable and help restore confidence in the market.
We're going to speed assistance to homeowners.
And we're going to turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurts so many hardworking Americans.
Okay, so we're going to investigate the banks now.
We forwarded them.
We made them do it.
We forced them to make these loans.
And now we're going to investigate what they did when they packaged these worthless loans.
We're going to find out what they did to make an obscene profit.
We're going to find out because we wanted to sit there and eat the excrement sandwich.
They were supposed to eat the loss.
That was their civic duty.
And they found a way to make money on this.
And that ticks us off.
So I'm sending Holder out there with some guns left over from Fast and Furious.
And we're going to find out what happened.
So the banks now are under the threat of investigation all over again.
That's what it is: the Home Affordable Refinance Program, HARP, Home Affordable Refinance Program.
This is Harp 3.
Okay, Lenny, Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania.
I'm glad you waited.
We go back to the phones.
It's great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Rush, I love you, brother.
But listen, I'm getting an eerie feeling now about these 2012 elections.
You know, these conservatives out here, we need to know you're going to actively support our nominee.
I'm getting a little deja vu.
Your support for McCain was tepid, and it's understandable that it was tepid, but I'm getting nervous that if Romney's the nominee, we're going to get tepid support again.
I think when this all shakes down, these primaries, we got to come together.
And I think you have to be the driving force.
Come together right now.
Beatles.
Do you know what the origins of come together were?
That was John Lennon, the Beatles wrote that song in support of Timothy Leary's.
He ran for president, I think.
That was a song designed to support, it's a campaign song for Timothy Leary.
And then Leary got busted for pot and embarrassed the Beatles, and they pulled up the song out, and he never ended up running for anything.
But that's why they wrote Come Together.
Let me tell you something out there, Lenny.
I've, yeah, it was Leary was running for governor against Reagan is what it was.
Timothy Leary was running for governor against Reagan, and the Beatles wrote Come Together as a thing to unify behind Timothy Leary's 1969.
Anyway, yesterday on this program, Lenny, when I was quite frankly here being beat up by my own audience for not making a choice, for not divulging for whom I was going to vote, I said to them, you, everybody on the audience yesterday, I said, when this is all over, I have to be positioned so that I can, with credibility, support whoever the nominee is,
which is why I'm going to great pains to throw no one under the bus.
This is a fine line because a lot of people want me to go pedal to the medal to be responsible for picking the nominee they want.
Going pedal to the medal would mean actively choosing one over the others.
And depending on how that went, if the one I chose didn't happen to win, then where am I?
Okay, how do I, depending on what I might end up saying in criticism of the guy who wins, what kind of credibility am I going to have supporting him when I didn't during this process?
So what I said was back in 2008, you may have a point.
I did say get drunk and vote for McCain in 2008.
I don't see it coming to that this time around.
I don't think that will be my campaign slogan in 2008.
But from the beginning of this primary season, I have said, in fact, early on when I said this, Zev Chaffetz, who wrote the book on me, an Army of One, sent me a note.
So, you know what you just did?
You just endorsed Romney.
And I wrote, but what are you talking about?
You just said that whoever wins a nomination, you're going to support him.
Well, any of them could win it.
Romney's the frontrunner.
You're just basically said if he wins, you're going to support him.
So it's a tantamount endorsement.
And I said, well, tantamount schmanamount, I didn't.
And I haven't.
But rest assured, one of the reasons that I've not gone scorched earth has been so that when the time comes, I can support the nominee to credibility because at the end of the day, like I opened this program with, the objectives, Obama, Lemmy.
That's how we have to focus.
The fix for what's wrong now is I opened the program.
Okay, what everybody thinks, oh my God, what do we do now?
All the non-myths, all the people think Romney's not the guy.
He's not conservative enough.
He's not a good enough politician.
All the criticisms are, what do we do?
Oh, no, Rush, what do we do?
We do what we should have been doing all along and focus on Obama, which has largely been what some of this program has been about.
You know that acronym, HARP, the Home Affordable Refinance Program, ought to be ACORN, because that's what it really is.
Ron in Alpine, Utah.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you on the program.
Thank you.
I'm getting so frustrated with the media and how they're portraying this whole Romney and Newt situation.
The 65 to 1 that's getting quoted so much as far as the ads ratio.
Nobody's taking into account that one of the strategies that Newt's doing is he's going on TV and on radio, and Hannity's giving him 15 minutes of unopposed airtime and spending half that time just going in and talking negatively about Romney.
So the value that he is getting by using that strategy to go around is very big, and nobody's even giving it any thought.
They're thinking that Romney's just going out there and just ramrodting him.
And then Newt goes around and complains like he's a little kid that's unfair.
And it's almost like Newt is trying to have socialized campaigning.
I mean, he's complaining about how Romney has.
Let me ask you.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
I just want to ask you a question.
Socialized campaigning.
So you make a good point.
Newt is getting a lot of free unchallenged time on television.
But put yourself in Newt's shoes for just a second.
There's no wrong answer here.
I really want to know how you would feel.
It's not a trick question.
If you had ad after ad after ad on television being run about you that you thought was chock full of lies, not saying that they are, that you thought, and that nobody was doing anything to correct the, what would you do for Romania?
What would your reaction be?
My problem is I don't think Newt's intellectually honest.
He's going around and complaining.
If I got bombarded, I'd be so mad.
And I would try and get out there and I would explain what is incorrect.
But on the other end, I wouldn't sit there and go and say equally vicious lies and portray myself as a saint and that I'm the one depressed.
I think this whole double standard and this double talk is what Obama does.
And that's what makes me so mad about politics is because they will say one thing and then do the very same thing that they're disgusted about.
And that makes me sick of the politicians.
If Newt were to go in there and say that Romney is rolling him over in all these different areas and then he would maintain some intellectual honesty, that's one thing.
But he's just taking sound bites, taking things out of context, and then he's starting to complain about it.
And I sit there and think about it.
What I'm hearing here is that you think Newt is reacting in a childish way to this.
Very much so.
I think it's more about Newt's ego and because he's offended.
And I think as a leader, he's going to have a problem with anybody who doesn't agree with him.
And he belittles.
I get it.
I know what you're talking about.
I'm just up against the clock here, and I have to take a break.
Glad you called out there, Ron.
We'll be back after this.
Still lots to do as the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
And the Rush Limbaugh program rolls on fastest three hours in media.
And let's just, folks, if you're sitting out there, you've been mad at me all day.
Can we just be adults here and admit that you really have no reason whatsoever to be mad at me?
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